On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 12:10:35 -0500, Warp wrote:

> Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
>> Heck, Bill O'Reilly (one of the FOX News guys) just recently tried to
>> say that nobody understands how tides work, and that's proof that God
>> exists.
> 
>   It seems that "nobody knows how this works" and "science has no
>   explanation
> for" are pretty common claims among young-earth creationists and
> conspiracy theorists. 

Indeed that does seem to be the case.

> What makes them rather egregious is that there
> most often *is* a pretty good explanation for those things, but the
> person making the claim has either been duped by someone that there
> isn't (and he lacks even the most basic of independent critical
> thinking), he deliberately refuses to accept the explanation (no matter
> how simple and understandable it might be) or he is outright lying
> (which, I suspect, is a very common case).

I would tend to agree.  That's the problem with religious (or any 
superstitious, for that matter) belief.  Anything that flies in the face 
of that deeply held belief tends to be discarded (unless the person is 
perfectly willing to accept the dogma as being incorrect - and in 
fairness, some religions do seem to promote critical thinking - Judaism 
comes to mind).  Some people just can't accept that things don't work the 
way they think they work, even if they have absolutely no scientific 
background that would help them understand the actual science of how it 
works.

In O'Reilly's case, he seems to have flunked basic physics and/or 
geometry.  Take two spherical objects, rotate one around the other while 
spinning it, and see how the objects look in relation to each other.  
OMG, the sun goes up and down regularly because there's an actual 
physical explanation!  Who would have known that?

(Well, in Galileo's time, certainly, that was questionable - but it's 
frightening to think that someone living in the modern world has only the 
scientific understanding that was popular several hundred years ago).

>   The sad thing is that this kind of claims will be believed by many who
> already have a basic bias to accepting such claims. You can claim almost
> anything to person holding a belief, and the person will accept the
> claim completely uncritically if it supports his belief, without ever
> even bothering to try to find out if it's actually true.

Yes.  Belief presupposes proof, because with proof, one doesn't need 
belief.

But I accept that some people aren't content with there being things they 
don't know - so if they have to belief in a big guy in the sky in order 
to be content, that's fine with me, so long as they don't prevent the 
rest of us from sharing how things *actually* work with those who want to 
know how things actually work.  For example, pushing creationism as 
"science" in the classroom.  I'm sorry, but "God did it" isn't a 
scientific principle, and it doesn't belong in a science classroom.  You 
want to teach that in church, fine.  Go ahead.  Knock yourself out.  Oh, 
and give kids the choice to decide for themselves whether they want to 
bury their heads in the sand and just accept "God did it" as an 
explanation for everything or if they want to learn how it really works - 
even if *nobody* knows.  Hell, *especially* if nobody knows.

But keep it out of the public school classroom.

Jim

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