In article <47415705@news.povray.org>, war### [at] tagpovrayorg says...
> Nicolas Alvarez <nic### [at] gmailisthebestcom> wrote:
> > Are you *still* thinking Warp was arguing against evolution?
> 
>   In that post he answered I was certainly not. The only thing I did was
> to question the notion of evidence being proof (of anything in general).
> 
>   He proceeded to write a lengthy novel about evidence pro evolution,
> which is not what I was talking about, so he seems to think that I was
> saying "evolution is not true". Whatever.
> 
Oh, gosh, sorry. Assuming that you might still be on about the thing 
that 90% of the entire thread was about was obviously completely silly 
of me. Or even trying to use an explanation of some things you might not 
know about it, to show how sometimes the gaps people complain about are 
not a big, or may not even exist, at least in the sense they talk about 
them.

As for questioning whether evidence constitutes truth. I supposed you 
have to come up with some definition for "truth" specific to how and who 
uses it. The dictionary definitions would tend to imply that a thing be 
true, just because its true. In the real world **nothing** works like 
that, not even the assertions made by the kinds of people making 
statements like, "Its absolutely true that Shiva exists." At some point 
someone is going to ask the rather embarrassing questions, "How do you 
know?", or, "What evidence do you have?" You are then stuck with either 
a) just killing the stupid fool that asked the question, or backing it 
with "some sort" of evidence. The questioner has to then make either a 
qualitative, a quantitative, or both, judgment about the veracity of 
that evidence. Most people don't know the difference between an allele 
and and Aunt Lelle, so make a purely quantitative judgment. Some make 
bullshit qualitative judgments, based solely on what they *want* to be 
true. ID tries to claim that *both* are valid by first insisting that 
you only get to be called a true believer *if* you agree with them, then 
making the even more stupid claim that being that "true" believers 
believe it, the fact that all true believers do believe it, and there 
are millions of them, means a damn thing either. So what. Lots of stupid 
stuff lots of people believed, and it didn't matter how *true* they 
where to that belief, they where still wrong, and better evidence proved 
it.

So, what does truth mean precisely? For most people *true* means that 
their belief and/or acceptance of it is based on what **they** consider 
reasonable qualitative and quantitative evidence. We saw in the Dover 
trial what *scientists* consider quantitative and qualitative evidence, 
thousands of papers, all supporting each others and prior conclusions, 
based on decades of people actually asking questions and looking for 
answers by doing research to test their theories. Ken Ham's museum is 
base on the *other* sides idea of what qualifies as "quantitative and 
qualitative": assertions that the other sides version can't be true, 
complaints about stuff they don't understand, references to the 
authority of scripture that the vast majority of Christians don't take 
literally, declarations that **those** people, unlike the small minority 
that do take it literally, can't be Christians, and lots and lots of 
claims that any day now they will pull *research* out of their ass that 
tests a hypothesis that even they say a) doesn't need to be tested, 
because, "qed: its the truth", and which they can't even describe 
*anything* about sufficiently to invent any sort of test of it. Their 
sole line of "research" is entirely based on coming up with an endless 
stream of questions they don't think scientists can answer, ignoring the 
answers, and asking the same questions again, while *once in a while* 
coming up with yet another mechanism or body part that they can call 
"irreducible", as though proving that *anything* can't be proven 
sufficiently by evolution automatically means their own hypothesis wins 
by default, instead of dozens of other similar ones, most of which are 
just as nonreligious as evolution.

In other words, you have scientist saying, "There is no valid grounds at 
this point to deny that evolution, by any reasonable definition, is 
**true**, even if some parts of it are still uncertain.", and a lot of 
goobers whining about how if "any" part of it is ever not explainable, 
they win, and calling their constant stream of pseudoscience and 
debunked questions "research". This is what *they* think is truth, "If 
we defeat the great monster we don't like, then everything we believe 
must, automatically, by default, be true, evidence be damned, and so 
will all the stupid fools that show up asking for things like facts, 
evidence or, you know, lab work, to prove we asking tested anything."

I am not sure what your definition of truth is, but if it comes even 
close to what these people are using, you have a huge problem. If its 
**at all** based on something closer to the scientific definition, then 
your only problem is that you are even less qualified than I am to 
complain about them using it (being as I actually understand some of the 
stuff you don't get about the subject).

-- 
void main () {

    call functional_code()
  else
    call crash_windows();
}

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