On 10/20/2010 11:04 PM, Darren New wrote:
> Patrick Elliott wrote:
>> On 10/20/2010 8:58 AM, Darren New wrote:
>>>> Sadly, this is not uncommon. However, many, including myself, have
>>>> argued that you cannot have such a drastic error in thinking, and not
>>>> have it spill over into your own discipline,
>>>
>>> Huh. Odd. Some of the smartest people I know doing computers are
>>> devoutly religious. I can't imagine why you'd think that belief that
>>> Jesus sacrificed himself to save you would interfere with your ability
>>> to design computer software, for example.
>>>
>> Right.. Because there isn't, for example, a very weird association
>> between either engineers *or* computer science, and the tendency of
>> both to think ID makes more sense than Evolution. Its invariably one
>> or the other, which ends up being the discipline someone belongs to,
>> when they claim to advocate ID.
>
> You know, I don't know where you grew up or anything, but I have the
> hardest time in the world understanding WTF you're going on about. That
> entire sentence makes no sense. It's like a written version of the G-Man
> speaking.
>

Its not about where I grew up. I read several blobs that deal with 
science, and invariably, every time the question of evolution comes up, 
you get *two* types of people claiming it doesn't work. 1. People that 
have no degrees **at all**, or understanding of anything related to it, 
and are religious. 2. People claiming that their vast experience in 
computers or engineering has "proven to them" that it can't work, oh, 
and.. also happen to be religious.

That is the point I am making. In my experience, even being *very good* 
at your discipline, seemingly, doesn't mean that your belief in certain 
religious concepts won't "bleed over" into that discipline, and 
undermine your ability to do you job. Like the religious guy I 
mentioned, who claimed to be a) religious, b) a programmer, and c) 
working on projects that use genetic algorithms, yet also d) they are 
useless and the whole theory behind them is wrong. That doesn't happen 
**unless** your gibberish from religion is informing your conclusions.

At best, the only argument that *is* valid, with regard to the idea that 
it may not have an effect, would be, "Depending on whether or not the 
goofy shit you believe directly addresses some subject you are studying, 
you may escape having your thinking muddled *in* your studies." The 
question then becomes, "How sure are you that what ever those goofy 
things are, you will *never* run across something that contradicts it, 
in your field?"

A lot of fields already have issues with failing to, for example, 
account for fluid dynamics, in biology, because the person is an expert 
in some specialty of biology, which doesn't require knowing fluid 
dynamics, at least until they ran into something that depended on it to 
work out what was going on. We like to think that ever discipline is so 
specialized that there is no overlaps. This is wrong. There are lots of 
overlaps, though they happen in the fringes of the discipline. The more 
specialized you get, the less you deal with those fringes, but the more 
likely you are to run into some case where you **need** one of those 
cross overs to explain something. Its one thing to be unaware of the 
answer, and have to, if you know who to ask, garner outside information 
from someone that *does* know. But, what happens when you a) don't know 
it, and b) don't believe you need to ask, because your "belief" about 
the subject implies that the answer lies in a church, instead of someone 
else's lab?

That is what I see happening with some of these people. If you want an 
example, just look at William Dembski. By all grounds, he seemed to be 
an adequate, at the least, mathematician, yet, the moment his 
creationism became an issue, he suddenly, and inexplicably, started 
doing math that would make almost anyone else embarrassed. Nothing he 
has done on the subject is more than superficially believable, and it 
contains so many errors, one has a hard time understanding how he 
managed to get his original degree. The only thing that explains this is 
that, the moment he had to deal with a situation where the math went 
against belief, he **had to** mangle the math, to support the belief, 
and, worse, actually can't understand why the result is invalid, 
defective, and mathematically unsound.

I have seen too many of these things to simply *accept* the assertion 
that someone isn't being influenced in their work, by things they, and 
others, claim our "outside of it", and therefor never effect it. It can 
and does happen. And, my basic argument is, unless you only stick to 
things that never come into conflict (which may, itself, mean you are 
not exploring the full range of possibilities in the discipline), you 
will **inevitably** run into a situation where one or the other needs to 
give. Which one does depends on both professional integrity, and how 
invested you are in what ever is in conflict. But, the conflict *will* 
happen.

-- 
void main () {
   If Schrödingers_cat is alive or version > 98 {
     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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