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From: John VanSickle
Subject: Re: A kind of revolution is happening in the United States
Date: 20 Apr 2011 15:14:36
Message: <4daf309c$1@news.povray.org>
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On 4/13/2011 4:02 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> You'll get no disagreement on either of those points. The best example
> of that (at the risk of Godwinning the thread) is Hitler - some claim
> that Hitler was an atheist because he did things; others claim that he
> did bad things because he was an atheist.
>
> But most of the people who *actually* did the bad things (not that Hitler
> didn't) were undeniably Christians who were following Hitler. Hitler's
> actual choice of beliefs really is a minor detail in the Holocaust.
They were by no means "undeniably" Christian. There is good ground to deny.
When contacted by American chaplains, many German prisoners-of-war
professed either atheism or nature-worship. It is true that most were
nominally Christians (specifically, either Lutheran or Catholic), but
they had long abandoned whatever faith they had acquired from either of
these churches.
Regards,
John
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From: John VanSickle
Subject: Re: A kind of revolution is happening in the United States
Date: 20 Apr 2011 15:33:08
Message: <4daf34f4$1@news.povray.org>
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On 4/14/2011 1:42 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/14/2011 10:00, Warp wrote:
>> I think Canada proves that hypothesis wrong, as Canada isn't any less
>> multicultural as the US (and guns are quite popular there too).
>
> Perhaps evidence against, yes. I think there's much more inter-culture
> hatred in America (intolerance?) than in Canada, even if there are the
> same number of different cultures. That's more what I was talking about.
From what I have read, an American living outside of our major inner
cities, and outside of the South, suffers the exact same crime rate as
anyone in Canada. Our high crime is very closely linked to inner-city
poverty and drug gangs. Outside of those areas we are just as peaceful
as any other industrialized nation.
Regards,
John
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From: Jim Henderson
Subject: Re: A kind of revolution is happening in the United States
Date: 20 Apr 2011 16:05:45
Message: <4daf3c99$1@news.povray.org>
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On Wed, 20 Apr 2011 15:14:36 -0400, John VanSickle wrote:
> They were by no means "undeniably" Christian. There is good ground to
> deny.
Explain. :)
> When contacted by American chaplains, many German prisoners-of-war
> professed either atheism or nature-worship. It is true that most were
> nominally Christians (specifically, either Lutheran or Catholic), but
> they had long abandoned whatever faith they had acquired from either of
> these churches.
Some undoubtedly did. I didn't say "all", I said "most". Finding
counterexamples really doesn't disprove the point.
Jim
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From: andrel
Subject: Re: A kind of revolution is happening in the United States
Date: 20 Apr 2011 17:09:20
Message: <4DAF4B7E.80909@gmail.com>
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On 20-4-2011 0:14, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/19/2011 14:51, Alain wrote:
>> In the case of ID, you effectively need to find and test every single
>> protein, enzimes, peptides and aminoacids in existance and their
>> predecessors to find at least one that can't possibly happen naturaly.
>
> That has nothing to do with proving ID.
It does unfortunately.
> The problem is that there are an infinite number of untestable theories
> out there. In order to show *any* support at all for ID, you not only
> have to find something that didn't/couldn't evolve naturally, but you
> have to show how it *did* come from God.
Don't confuse the messenger with the message. Most advocates of ID are
Christians, but they could be muslim, jews and polytheists or animists too.
The devilish scheme they use is playing within our rules. It is clear
that Creationism is not science, no hypothesis, no explanatory power, no
evidence and not testable.
So what they do is formulate something as a hypothesis that is testable.
It doesn't matter that every protein or whatever they throw at the
scientists will be taken to pieces and strengthen the case for
evolution. There will always be more examples to have them refute. The
number is finite, so it is in principle decidable and testable. Only it
will take decades to disprove all possible claims.
There are similarities with a filibuster. It is within the rules of the
game, and you can not prevent it without braking the whole process. Yet
is costs lots of time. And you can always hope that before they finished
you can think of another useless hypothesis or even better that your
party will have taken control of education and science funding.
> Depending, of course, on what you mean by "naturally". It's entirely
> possible one might find something that could not have arisen without the
> interference of intelligent planning and forethought but which is
> nevertheless completely naturally evolved.
>
> But disproving that every single molecule of life on Earth is evolved
> does nothing zero nada towards proving what *did* happen with that
> molecule. Even *if* every single protein could not possibly have evolved
> naturally, that doesn't tell you anything about how it *did* come to be.
If you look closely at the statements of ID you will find that there is
no reference to who or what that 'intelligent designer' is or even how
many there are.
In practice a lot of ID advocates do not fully understand the concept
and claim that they know the name of the designer. At that point they
invalidate their own claim of it being a scientific hypothesis and their
proposal will be taken out of the process.
I am always amazed by the number of stupid mistakes they make. If their
proposals had been more intelligently designed they could have been so
much more effective in their quest for the removal of critical thinking
from the US.
--
Apparently you can afford your own dictator for less than 10 cents per
citizen per day.
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From: Darren New
Subject: Re: A kind of revolution is happening in the United States
Date: 20 Apr 2011 17:58:26
Message: <4daf5702$1@news.povray.org>
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On 4/20/2011 14:09, andrel wrote:
> On 20-4-2011 0:14, Darren New wrote:
>> On 4/19/2011 14:51, Alain wrote:
>>> In the case of ID, you effectively need to find and test every single
>>> protein, enzimes, peptides and aminoacids in existance and their
>>> predecessors to find at least one that can't possibly happen naturaly.
>>
>> That has nothing to do with proving ID.
>
> It does unfortunately.
No, really, it doesn't, even if you accept "ID" to mean "intelligent design".
You've simply found something that evolution fails at. But nobody has proven
that there is no mechanism other than ID and evolution.
> So what they do is formulate something as a hypothesis that is testable.
And what is the hypothesis? That a particular protein didn't evolve? Or that
some intelligence actually created that protein?
> If you look closely at the statements of ID you will find that there is no
> reference to who or what that 'intelligent designer' is or even how many
> there are.
But there's a reference to intelligence and design. "This protein could not
have evolved", even if found, does not imply "someone designed it."
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Coding without comments is like
driving without turn signals."
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From: andrel
Subject: Re: A kind of revolution is happening in the United States
Date: 20 Apr 2011 18:26:32
Message: <4DAF5D97.8070704@gmail.com>
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On 20-4-2011 23:58, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/20/2011 14:09, andrel wrote:
>> On 20-4-2011 0:14, Darren New wrote:
>>> On 4/19/2011 14:51, Alain wrote:
>>>> In the case of ID, you effectively need to find and test every single
>>>> protein, enzimes, peptides and aminoacids in existance and their
>>>> predecessors to find at least one that can't possibly happen naturaly.
>>>
>>> That has nothing to do with proving ID.
>>
>> It does unfortunately.
>
> No, really, it doesn't, even if you accept "ID" to mean "intelligent
> design".
>
> You've simply found something that evolution fails at.
indeed
> But nobody has
> proven that there is no mechanism other than ID and evolution.
indeed
>> So what they do is formulate something as a hypothesis that is testable.
>
> And what is the hypothesis? That a particular protein didn't evolve? Or
> that some intelligence actually created that protein?
That there are proteins (etc.) that didn't evolve by natural selection.
Or even weaker that their presence is easier explained by design than as
a result of natural selection. (hijacking Occam's razor).
I know of no other way of disproving that, than by checking each and
every protein (etc.). I you know another way how to defuse this bomb,
feel free to share.
>> If you look closely at the statements of ID you will find that there
>> is no
>> reference to who or what that 'intelligent designer' is or even how many
>> there are.
>
> But there's a reference to intelligence and design. "This protein could
> not have evolved", even if found, does not imply "someone designed it."
But in all likelihood it would imply that it's presence would be easier
explained by assuming it was designed. By someone, something, a
committee, or a mad scientist.
--
Apparently you can afford your own dictator for less than 10 cents per
citizen per day.
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From: Patrick Elliott
Subject: Re: A kind of revolution is happening in the United States
Date: 20 Apr 2011 18:42:20
Message: <4daf614c$1@news.povray.org>
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On 4/19/2011 3:14 PM, Darren New wrote:
> On 4/19/2011 14:51, Alain wrote:
>> In the case of ID, you effectively need to find and test every single
>> protein, enzimes, peptides and aminoacids in existance and their
>> predecessors to find at least one that can't possibly happen naturaly.
>
> That has nothing to do with proving ID.
>
> The problem is that there are an infinite number of untestable theories
> out there. In order to show *any* support at all for ID, you not only
> have to find something that didn't/couldn't evolve naturally, but you
> have to show how it *did* come from God.
>
Not to split hairs here, but while its pretty damn obvious they "want"
god to be the answer, in nearly all cases, there are still a small
subset that may be serious about the whole, "Life here couldn't have
evolved, so maybe space aliens..." Yeah, I know, its bloody idiotic, but
ID can exist without god, in principle. Still doesn't help matters at
all for them, since the central premise to the whole thing is,
"Complexity doesn't happen by chance.", which is demonstratively false,
in and of itself. On the contrary, complexity happens because the
universe isn't some huge mass of stuff, all of which forms crystal
lattices when it gets jammed together. The number of things that do is
small, and even then, other things get mixed in and disorder it. The
finite state of entropy isn't perfect order, its a stable, but near
complete chaos. And, as things try to balance out and reach a stable
state, the interim result is ordered complexity.
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From: Patrick Elliott
Subject: Re: A kind of revolution is happening in the United States
Date: 20 Apr 2011 18:47:54
Message: <4daf629a$1@news.povray.org>
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On 4/20/2011 2:09 PM, andrel wrote:
> If you look closely at the statements of ID you will find that there is
> no reference to who or what that 'intelligent designer' is or even how
> many there are.
> In practice a lot of ID advocates do not fully understand the concept
> and claim that they know the name of the designer. At that point they
> invalidate their own claim of it being a scientific hypothesis and their
> proposal will be taken out of the process.
> I am always amazed by the number of stupid mistakes they make. If their
> proposals had been more intelligently designed they could have been so
> much more effective in their quest for the removal of critical thinking
> from the US.
>
And, if you look even more carefully, with the exception of outliers,
nearly every single one of the advocates have admitted, at one point or
another, that God is the answer they want, and why they invented the
whole idiocy in the first place. Second problem is, those outliers are
not accepted by the main branch of ID at all, or even acknowledged much.
Third, no designer other than god solves the central problem, which is,
if something made life here, something else had to either have *been
made* or *evolved* some place else. A fact that gives up the entire game
right from the start line.
There is nothing about ID that isn't religion. Anything that implies
otherwise has only been added as window dressing, while being rejected
when talking about the real purpose, or the ravings of a few UFO people,
who sort of like the idea, because they never look past the implications
of life being created here, to the consequence of where/how it had to
have started some place else.
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From: Patrick Elliott
Subject: Re: A kind of revolution is happening in the United States
Date: 20 Apr 2011 19:01:38
Message: <4daf65d2$1@news.povray.org>
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On 4/20/2011 3:26 PM, andrel wrote:
>> But there's a reference to intelligence and design. "This protein could
>> not have evolved", even if found, does not imply "someone designed it."
>
> But in all likelihood it would imply that it's presence would be easier
> explained by assuming it was designed. By someone, something, a
> committee, or a mad scientist.
>
Sadly, you can make a similar argument with the bridge analogy. That
bridge, since there is no way it could stay up if you removed certain
things, "could not have been designed", so it must QED be a natural
formation. The only reason we don't hear people making this sort of
moronic claim is purely bias. In both cases, the correct answer is, "We
don't know what scaffolding may have existed, which allowed it to
evolve/be built." In either argument, lack of understanding of how it
could have formed doesn't prove the assertion that one or the other
solution is true. Only finding, a) in the case of DNA, a species that
still has part/all of the precursor, b) figuring out how such a
precursor might have happened, or c) in the case of a bridge, watching
someone build a similar one, gets you any place. What doesn't get you
any place? Postulating that some invisible architect, alien, god, or
otherwise, simply "inserted" the whole, complete, design into the genome
(or dropped a complete bridge in place), without themselves using some
sort of scaffolding to do it. Frankly, it doesn't matter if they used
mental scaffolding and then just sequenced the gene from that, or
anti-gravity beams, to lift the rocks. You still need some sort of
"process" to get the result.
ID's central premise, sadly, is that it just "poofed" into being. Hell,
even the ones arguing "front loading", fail to grasp that any such
"master genetic code", to avoid breaking the organism fatally, while
inserting new features, has to take clear steps, in which it replaces
parts of the system, only as possible, before reaching and end result.
You don't get to, in a running machine, replace entire sections of the
guts, unless you can turn the thing off, or reboot it, or something.
What "front loading" suggests is nothing less that replacing a whole
mess of "working" code, all at once, the same way you would your video
drivers and core kernel drivers, without either rebooting the machine,
or restarting the kernel. Which, doesn't work. Thus, to do it, you need,
again, something that can simply "magic" the changes in, whole cloth,
without restarting/rebooting/etc.
There is a reason why a lot of biologists use the term IDiocy to
describe this. Sadly, a few too many comp-sci people fail to grasp why
its similarly intractable in terms of computer code (where, the
equivalent in that would be taking a running application, and inserting
new code into it, without breaking links, jump points, functionality, or
mangling the data being processed, mid-change).
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From: Patrick Elliott
Subject: Re: A kind of revolution is happening in the United States
Date: 20 Apr 2011 19:08:35
Message: <4daf6773@news.povray.org>
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On 4/19/2011 3:24 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Tue, 19 Apr 2011 14:38:22 -0700, Patrick Elliott wrote:
>
>> Actually, this represents two huge problems with their hypothesis
>> (please stop using theory, since that implies they already have some
>> sort of evidence to imply it is/could be true).
>
> Just a fair point, "theory" can also mean "hypothesis", just as it can
> mean "body of knowledge about a scientific subject".
>
> Jim
No it can't. Not in science. In science the two terms have clear and
distinct differences. The only place they mean the same thing is in
non-scientific language, where they get used damn near interchangeably.
This leads to serious confusion in the non-scientific world, since its
about the equivalent of trying to go from the normal world into
politics, where lie = reasonable opinion, and truth = negotiable
interpretation.
If you want to understand something, you need to use clear definitions.
Outside of the scientific community, the distinction between hypothesis
and theory is muddier than hell, with guess and theory being used to
mean the same thing, and hypothesis having no use at all. In reality, on
a scale of 1-10, where 1 = guess, and 10 = theory, hypothesis is, maybe
a 3 or 4. There may be sufficient cause, from experience, to presume
that an hypothesis is worthy of examination, but it isn't yet a theory,
since you haven't "done" anything to actually test it.
The last thing needed is to muddy the waters more, by claiming that an
untested hypothesis = an established theory.
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