On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:38:58 -0500, John VanSickle wrote:

> This claim does not come strictly from uninformed masses.  It is also
> made by people more knowledgeable than you and I put together.

But in all the cases I've found, it comes from them when they reach the 
limit of their knowledge - then they fall back on "God did it" because 
they can't explain any further.

Jim

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Jim Henderson <nos### [at] nospamcom> wrote:
> On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:38:58 -0500, John VanSickle wrote:

> > This claim does not come strictly from uninformed masses.  It is also
> > made by people more knowledgeable than you and I put together.

> But in all the cases I've found, it comes from them when they reach the 
> limit of their knowledge - then they fall back on "God did it" because 
> they can't explain any further.

  While there most probably are such people in existence, I think it's
pretty rare for somebody to have the opinion "I have no idea how complex
life came into existence, but I don't think it was by natural processes"
without also believing that some kind of god or other intelligence did it
as a conscious and deliberate act. I have never heard of a hardcore atheist
proclaiming that he doesn't believe that life could have formed by natural
processes (although I'm pretty sure there a few of those as well, but as
said, the are probably are very small minority).

  Attributing unexplained phenomena to a god (much less to the Christian
God of the Bible) is one of the oldest fallacies, and one which gets
narrowed down more and more as science progresses. Nobody in their right
mind, not even the most hardcore fundamentalist believers, would claim
nowadays that eg. the flu is caused by supernatural demons or that lighting
bolts are supernatural manifestations of a god. Why? Because nowadays we
know exactly what causes them, so there's no need for a supernatural
explanation. The "God did it" explanation recesses further and further to
the more basic elements of nature. Some hundreds of years ago almost
everything was caused by some supernatural phenomenon, but nowadays the
argument has had to recess so much that there's almost nothing left. The
only couple of things left are the tired old "where did the universe come
from" and "how did life from on Earth", and that's about it. About everything
else has already been explained by science so clearly that not even the
most fundamentalist of believers can resort to them anymore.

  This is basically the "god of the gaps" argument, and it's getting pretty
flimsy.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Invisible <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >>>     As for math, would you say that, for example, the branch of mathematics
> >>> called geometry studies how the real world works or not?
> >
> >> Which geometry? Euclidean geometry? Elliptic geometry? Hyperbolic
> >> geometry? Some sort of non-homogeneous geometry?
> >
> >> Pure mathematics studies these geometries purely for their own sake. One
> >> or other of them /may/ correspond to the real world.
> >
> >    The very word "geometry" means "measuring land" (from ancient greek
> > geo = earth/land, metri = measurement).

> And the very word "atom" means "cannot be cut". Not without a particle 
> accelerator, anyway...

  So what you are implying with that sentence is that the concept of geometry
being used to measure and describe the real world is bogus?

  (And if what you are implying is that geometry is not an accurate
representation of the real world, making it a non-science, then by the
same logic Newtonian mechanics is not science. Heck, General Relativity is
most probably not science by the same argument.)

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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On Mon, 10 Jan 2011 11:47:40 -0500, Warp wrote:

> About everything else has already been explained by science so clearly
> that not even the most fundamentalist of believers can resort to them
> anymore.

Except that they do, of course.

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.

Of course, he's no astrophysicist (unlike Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who 
answered that question for him on The Colbert Report last week <g>), but 
even I know how tides work.  And I understand how the sun goes up and 
down every day, too (which O'Reilly didn't seem to know, either).

Jim

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John VanSickle <evi### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> Be that as it may, I am against the teaching of life's origins on the 
> public dime,

  The theory of evolution != the theory of life's origins.

  The theory of evolution says nothing about how life first came into
existence on Earth. That would be abiogenesis.

  Basically the only thing that the theory of evolution postulates is that
the genes of large populations change over time (something even the most
hardcore young-earth creationists don't deny) and that some changes get
preserved while others disappear due to natural selection (again, something
the creationists don't deny). That's about it.

> because it is a matter of public debate,

  The public doesn't get to decide the truth. That's just silly.

> What 
> invariably happens, when the government is allowed this power, is that 
> the people who are in the wrong will go running to the government to 
> have their view imposed by fiat, and all conflicting views suppressed to 
> one degree or another.

  So now teaching the theory of evolution is a government conspiracy. Right.

  Guess what happened to your credibility just now.

>  At the present moment a person who is skeptical 
> that natural selection is sufficient to explain the entirety of 
> observable living systems is subject to exclusion from participating in 
> scientific and educational endeavors, even when the topic has no bearing 
> on the origin of life.

  Would you also allow holocaust-deniers, 9/11 conspiracy theorists and
anti-vaccinationists to teach at public schools, just for "balance"?

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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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. 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).

  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.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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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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Warp wrote:
> without also believing that some kind of god or other intelligence did it

Interestingly enough, all the "evidence" for ID is equally explained by 
evolved outer-space aliens doing genetic engineering on Earth. Even *if* you 
accept that evolution couldn't have produced the eye, or flagellum, or 
whatever, you *still* don't get to say it must have been God, unless you 
also rule out life anywhere else in the universe.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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Invisible wrote:
> And then, of course, there's Stephen Wolfram, who suggests that not just 
> matter but time itself is quantum, and that the universe is actually a 
> giant cellular automaton, and that the observed quanta are actually the 
> cells of the cellular grid. (They guy probably needs to put down the CA 
> simulator and go outside for a little while.)

He's far from the first person to come up with that idea. And I'm also 
pretty sure Wolfram thinks the network connections between cells are far 
smaller than an individual particle or quark or whatever.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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Invisible wrote:
> The fundamental difference between ST and ID, of course, is that ST has 
> a realistic possibility of becoming testable some day soon. ID does not.

ID is testable. It just failed the tests. But it's certainly testable.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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