Questioning Society discussion
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FREEDOM OF SCIENCE
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yep im agree..thts just no sense for me.
"You say that there isn't much good that comes from it, which implies that you believe that some good does come from it. "The good of religion is it has lobby power in the government, and can get massive amounts of funding, and at least some of it goes to charity and stuff. While the other part goes to televangelists.
"think relegion is the most important things!!!
coz, without a religion we like doesnt have a road to way.
i see him like in the air, no destiny.
wht is your religion?
idk, i just not agree if he make a science to be THE ONLY ONE REASON to doesnt have a religion. "
That was not coherent. Please organize your thoughts more.
I've heard native speakers of English with much worse grammar on the internet.
"It is properly labeled. God = fantasy. "Win.
The Invisible Pink Unicorn is not ridiculous. She will smite you for that, bless her Holy Hooves. >.> :)
They continue to wallow, for I have said that multiple times and no one will listen.
The middle can be swayed. It's only fundamentalists that we can never reach. I'm getting my friends in on it, told them all the read the God Delusion, stuff like that. 
Ninja wrote: "Lauren wrote: ""Then why is there a 65 million year gap between the first dinosaur fossils and humans?"Using carbon copy dating, or whatever the term for that is? It's been shown that that dating..."
I'm weeks behind, but show me the evidence. Radiometric dating is generally very accurate. There are multiple radiometric clocks, not just one. C14 is only a good clock for relatively recent events, but its errors are well understood and other clocks take over for older events.
Most dinosaurs are dated with Uranium-bearing crystal compounds.
And no matter what, while one can argue about whether there is a 1% error or a 5% error in these methods, there isn't a 1000000% error, which is the kind of number necessary for evolution to be wrong and creationism or "stupid design" to be correct. Stupid for every reason -- who designed the designers? What evidence do we have of the designers? I can make up a thousand science fiction stories where space aliens design the earth and the life on it and even develop it over a few billion years as IF it were evolution, but that doesn't make any of these stories true, especially in the absence of specific evidence supporting them.
rgb
Ninja wrote: "Lauren wrote: ""You'll learn this when you get to high school bio."I've taken high school bio. I'm in college, I've graduated."
Then why didn't you learn anything from it? Lauren did. Take some physics courses. Astrophysics (with some cosmology thrown in). A course in evolutionary biology and genetics. That's what college is for!
So why are you ignoring everything you are being taught, or have been taught? I know, because it conflicts with the Bible and the Bible is always right, so the science must be wrong. Especially if you never bothered to learn it or understand it.
rgb
Ninja wrote: "I have learned about evolution, there just seem to be too many flaws. We discussed it in class, and there were people on both sides. Teacher did try to be diplomatic, and corrected kids when they s..."There aren't any flaws that convince any actual scientists that it is incorrect. I have no idea what sort of class you were in that permitted you to lend credence to any idea to the contrary. One of those "my opinion is as good as yours and we don't need no stinkin' references to actual science" courses, or discussions, I rather expect.
rgb
If you want to see evolution in action, study the breeding of animals. A mere 400 years ago, there were hardly any breeds of dogs. Most modern dog breeds did not exist. Dog breeding causes extremely noticable drift in the species because dogs are particularly rapid mutators, and because humans can exert a large amount of unnatural selection, proving that the mechanism of mutation and selection works in real time in the laboratory.In nature it takes longer, because as long as an animal functions "well enough" in their ecological niche, there is very little selection pressure favoring changes, and there are often pressures that oppose change as well that are stronger. A species is in a "dynamical, metastable" equilibrium with its local ecology, and evolves only in response to long-time-scale or severe alterations in that ecology.
When those happen, however, evolution does speed right on up. As it did with dogs.
rgb
Lauren wrote: "And why aren't there half dog half wolves running around? Because the became two separate populations, with TWO DIFFERENT GENE POOLS so there can't be any cross over. We are so far evolved we can't combine."Actually, there are half dogs and half wolves running around -- they can still interbreed. There are half dog-half foxes, too. There are ligers and tigons. In fact, there is far more ability for different species to reproduce than was once appreciated. Mammals with different numbers of chromosomes can sometimes produce offspring, and those offspring are even sometimes themselves fertile (and sometimes not, consider the mule).
This is one place where the original version of the theory of evolution was at least partially incorrect. Genetic algorithms are actually more powerful than Darwin anticipated, considering reproductive mutation followed by natural selection alone. Or at least, there are more pathways to natural variation than just mutation in the sense of changing a gene or chromosome.
I'm actually a bit of an expert in evolutionary algorithms because I wrote genetic optimization programs for computers, and crossover is all by itself an extremely important mechanism, present in advanced species but not in primitive ones. Cross-species reproduction may have played a role in key changes as well, when two different species are placed in close proximity and with reproductive pressure driving it.
Nature isn't dogmatic. Lots of things happen by pure chance, and some of those things are "lucky". All Darwin noted is that given time, those lucky breaks search for new solutions far, far faster than you might think based on chance alone, making a "far jump" from a species with no eyes to a species with a fully functional eye. That is unlikely, but there are billions of alternative partial pathways that can span the difference in smaller steps, and given the advantages of sight of any sort and incremental improvements, it is not at all surprising that it evolved to a highly perfected form in many, many species.
rgb
Ninja wrote: "But if, in the future, there was logical evidence for Creationism, would it be acceptable to teach?And this isn't just about Intelligent Design. If you watch Expelled, it talks about how certain ..."
Maybe because the hypothesis is so silly? Maybe because it is obviously (what was it Lauren called it:-) "Creationism in sheep's clothing?" Maybe because hypothesizing that humans were designed in absence of any evidence whatsoever for a designer is really stupid?
Look, SETI is a legitimate first step in a theory of ID, and the government is funding it. You want to postulate aliens, first find some aliens, don't just say "aliens might have done it". The difference between science and science fiction is a narrow one, but there is a difference!
Another reason that people don't take them seriously is that the "theory" of evolution is overwhelmingly successful. If you wanted to say that the theory of universal gravitation is wrong because invisible fairies actually pull things around in their orbits, you'd be laughed out of the house. And rightfully so. The theory of evolution is no different. What facts are not adequately explained by evolution? That would be "none of them". What evidence is there that it is correct? That would be (literally) "mountains of it". What aspects of evolution don't make sense in the light of our other knowledge of the sciences or mathematics? That would be "none of them".
So sure, if in the future there were a credible, falsifiable theory that explained all of the observed facts as well as or better than TTOE, or some "deal killer" were discovered refuting TTOE that needed a new theory to explain, scientists would be perfectly happy studying it and, to the extent that it worked, teaching it.
After all, this happens all the time. It is PART of science, which doesn't pretend to know all the answers, only the best way to look for them without bias.
Which is really why those people are and should be fired, why it is and should be difficult for them to get funded. They aren't proposing a theory, they're proposing a religious view disguised as a theory. Complexity alone is not sufficient reason to believe that there "must" be an intelligent cause, as we observe staggering complexity (and understand it) that arises from natural causes,
rgb
rgb
"Maybe because the hypothesis is so silly? Maybe because it is obviously (what was it Lauren called it:-) "Creationism in sheep's clothing?" Maybe because hypothesizing that humans were designed in absence of any evidence whatsoever for a designer is really stupid?"Creationism in a cheap tux. X)
I would add to it, but you covered everything.
Rachel wrote: "That is a very definitive statement Nathan. Either you alone possess the evidence that will disprove God once and for all (in which case, please enlighten us), or you were there when the universe was created and can say with absolute certainty that God was not the catalyst."One doesn't even need evidence, only ontology.
Definition: The Universe is everything that exists.
Therefore, if God exists, God is part of or possibly the whole set of all things that exist. The name we give to that set is "the Universe".
It can therefore be positively stated that if God exists, God did not create the Universe.
This point of view is overwhelmingly supported by physics, where the relevant physical law is "Conservation of mass-energy". We've never ever observed mass-energy being created. It is only moved around, rearranged. The laws of physics are mostly laws that govern that rearrangement. In fact, creation as we use the term when referring to "the Universe" is something that as far as we know is pure fiction, something that never happens or has ever happened.
Mind you, your statement that God might still exist is a valid one. But if you try to imagine a God that is consistent with natural history as we observe it, that God is not a creator of all things, it is all things. That is really the only way one can come up with a theory of God that has attributes like omniscience and omnipresence -- if God is everywhere, is all times, is all things, then the idea doesn't contradict a standard model of God.
All other models have flaws, and the latter model can't be proven or disproven by finite experiments, because the Universe still works the way it works whether you name it God or name it Universe.
The Universe is pretty awesome either way.
rgb
Lauren wrote: "I would add to it, but you covered everything. "There wasn't a lot I really needed to cover. As I worked through the whole thread, you had already done a really spectacular job of covering it, with a bit of help from Nathan and Dan.
I respond to some of this more out of a need to express myself verbally as an alternative to raised blood pressure and running through the house going "No! No! No!" in a shrill voice.
The Big Bang, for Gawd's sake. We have pictures of it! We can see it! We can see the formation of the first stars!
But then, anyone who has gone into a museum of natural history and seen the skeletons of dinosaurs and early mammals and birds and reptiles, sorted out in order of their layer and radiometrically determined dating, and laid out in evolutionary trees and STILL holds onto creationism it is just a Queen of Egypt.
Living, as they say, in a state of De Nile.
rgb
"I respond to some of this more out of a need to express myself verbally as an alternative to raised blood pressure and running through the house going "No! No! No!" in a shrill voice."And annoying everyone forced to reside with the mad scientist. :)
"The Big Bang, for Gawd's sake. We have pictures of it! We can see it! We can see the formation of the first stars!"
Indeed. I was watching the news with footage from space about this new thing they're putting onto the satellite. Yes, that is exactly how much I pais attention.
lol very punny. I lived in the NYC natural history museum.
Mod
Tech. we don't since none of us were there for it.
♥ Bella♥ {Hold Me: I’m a Fermata} wrote: "Lauren wrote: "The Big Bang, for Gawd's sake. We have pictures of it! We can see it! We can see the formation of the first stars!"Tech. we don't since none of us were there for it."
What does this mean? When I look across the room and see a sofa, am I supposed to doubt its existence because I'm seeing it as it was ten nanoseconds ago?
When I look at the moon am I supposed to doubt its existence because I am seeing it as it was 1.25 seconds preveiously (when I "wasn't there")? When I see the sun should I doubt that actually was there eight minutes ago when the light I see was emitted from its surface? When I use a telescope to look at Jupiter as it was half an hour (approximately) ago am I "not there for it" so I should doubt that it ever happened?
Just what distance from your eyes do things have to be before you start to doubt that the light coming into them, that forms images in a completely understandable way that is precisely the same independent of distance, no longer corresponds to actual events?
Looking out in space is looking back in time because of the speed of light. The light of almost all of the stars you can see at night was given off long before you were born. The light from the Andromeda galaxy (one of our nearest galactic neighbors) was given off long before there were any humans, before there were any animals that were particularly close to becoming humans.
I appreciate the value of skepticism. Now tell me exactly where I should draw the line. My sofa? The moon? Jupiter? The nearest stars (the ones we can determine the distance to using nothing but parallax)? Andromeda? How far back? A billion years (objects a billion light years distant)? Ten billion? Thirteen and a half billion?
We can, indeed see it the Big Bang. There are pictures of it on a dozen pages on Wikipedia or any other encyclopedia online. There are books on it in any library. You can learn of the evidence for it -- it isn't just one thing, or two things, it is ten things, it is thousands and thousands of things. All of physics is part of the evidence for the Big Bang -- it is how we do things like determine the distance and infer the time, it is how we measure what the distant matter consists of using spectroscopy. So when the Hubble takes pictures of a glowing mass dimly seen through the dust clouds out of which it is being built at the edge of the visible Universe (13.5 billion light years away), and photographs slightly closer objects that are just stars, a reasonable inference is that the most distant visible object is an enormously massive star being formed by the slow pull of gravity, and that the light from the clouds beyond, that 3 degree microwave background, is the light from the big bang itself, scattered from the cooled clouds of hydrogen and helium (in a ratio of 3:1 in cosmic abundance) that it created.
Otherwise you are never "there" at a point you look it. You are always some distance away, and what you see is some time in the past. Microscopes extend your vision to let you see the very small. Telescopes extend your vision to let you view images of distant objects up close. Radiotelescopes let you look at other frequencies of light -- radio waves, infrared, ultraviolet, x-rays -- all just light, and form images of what they see.
Do you have a problem with "tech"?
rgb
We can, actually. Because of the size of the universe and the limited speed of light, we actually look back in time to how the stars looked million of years ago. Because it takes that long to reach Earth. So, if you look really far away, you see into how the past looked. It's a proven fact.
Mod
Mod
Ninja wrote: "Okay wait Lauren. If we can see the past why can't we get to the past?"Are you deliberately just not reading my posts? That is answered in complete detail up above, and Lauren's observation contained the answer as well. Or do you want an answer involving entropy and the arrow of experiential time?
You know, all of your questions of this sort would be answered if you just learned some calculus and took some physics courses...
rgb
Mod
Are you deliberately just not reading my posts? That is answered in complete detail up above, and Lauren's observation contained the answer as well. Or do you want an answer involving entropy and the arrow of experiential time?
You know, all of your questions of this sort would be answered if you just learned some calculus and took some physics courses..."
Um, did you not read my post?
Hey, sorry I've been gone for a bit people! If anybody had any really important questions they wanted me to answer please state them again. There are a ton of comments now and it'd be time consuming to try and go through them all.
"You know, all of your questions of this sort would be answered if you just learned some calculus and took some physics courses..."haha, I learned it from the Magic School Bus.
It's literally like, 3 sentences. Not the much.
Ninja wrote: "Um, did you not read my post?"Sorry, it was the post right before Lauren's and I thought you might have started more at the top of the current page.
My bad...
rgb
tis okay. :)But, once you read them, then we can continue to debate, no?
Mod
Sorry, it was the post right before Lauren's and I thought you might have started more at the top of the current page.
My bad...
rgb"
Okay :)
I'm sorry, but I don't see why religious pseudo-science should be taught in schools. Really. Schools should teach science, not religion. People say to teach the controversy, but there really is no controversy among scientists about things like evolution. Evolution is the foundation of modern biology. Without it, things cease to make sense. There really is no controversy to teach. It's like saying we should teach the "controversy" of astronomy vs astrology. And why only Christian creation myths? Why not Hindu myths, or Islamic, or Buddhist? Oh right, because all the Christian parents would freak out because their kids are being taught the wrong thing. Just to let you know, that's how the rest of us feel when we get taught Christianity in school. Do you really think that the little Muslim or Hindu or atheist kids like being taught your creation myths? Trust me, we don't.
And as for the improbability of Earth being so perfect, it isn't improbable at all. There are an estimated 100 billion planets in the known universe. If only one of them was suitable for life, then the universe is very unlucky indeed. With those kinds of numbers, is it really surprising that one planet was in the right spot? It would be more surprising if it wasn't. And as for things like gravity and other cosmological constants, if you look at those as being properties of matter then their existence is rather obvious. There is a reason why most scientists (and by most I mean all of the real scientists) are not "creation science" proponents.
And I say real scientists not because I am anti-religious or anything like that. I say that because creation science does not follow the scientific method, which is what defines science. Real science observes, tests, and then bases conclusions off of those observations. When new facts come to light, theories are changed to fit them. That is the heart of science. Creation science has a theory already, and tries to find evidence to match it, ignoring all evidence to the contrary. Science finds facts and asks "what does this prove?" Creation science has a theory and asks, "how can we support it?" And that is why anyone with a true scientific heart will reject creationism. It goes against everything that science stands for. It goes against the very definition of science.
Another problem with creationism is that it is content with not knowing things. When it gets to something it doesn't know, it says "God did it," and stops there. The lack of information is the answer, the stopping point. With real science, the questions, the unknown, are exactly what people are looking for, because it means that there is still something to discover. Scientists love the questions, not because they are a stopping point, but because they are the beginning.
And that is why creation science is hurting real science. Because whenever a scientists says they don't know how something works, creationists jump on it as proof that science as a whole is bunk and God is clearly the answer. This makes scientists afraid of the unknown, afraid of admitting it, when they should be telling everyone what they don't know, so that more people can help them figure it out. Creationism is a blight on the scientific community, because it twists and corrupts the one thing that keeps science going: questions. It treats questions as the enemy of science, when really they are the driving force behind it. It treats questions as a stopping point, when really, they are the beginning.
And that is why anyone with a true scientific leaning will dismiss creation science. That, and of course the overwhelming evidence against almost everything they claim, and the simplification of things with Ockham's razor that makes the creationist standpoint unnecessary. But that's another tirade entirely.
And if you want to talk about freedom of science, look at what the religious right is doing to stem cell research. That branch of science definitely isn't free, and it is actually science and it actually has the potential to help people, unlike creationism.
Emily wrote: "And as for the improbability of Earth being so perfect, it isn't improbable at all. There are an estimated 100 billion planets in the known universe. If only one of them was suitable for life, then the universe is very unlucky indeed. With those kinds of numbers, is it really surprising that one planet was in the right spot? It would be more surprising if it wasn't. And as for things like gravity and other cosmological constants, if you look at those as being properties of matter then their existence is rather obvious. There is a reason why most scientists (and by most I mean all of the real scientists) are not "creation science" proponents."I don't want to interrupt a perfectly admirable rant with too many corrections, but just a couple:
There are 100 billion stars in our galaxy alone, and there are roughly 1 trillion galaxies in the visible universe, many of which are larger than our galaxy. Then, there isn't any good reason to think that the Universe stops at the event horizon of the Earth, because no, we are not the center of creation save in the sense that all points are in the middle of an infinite space.
I think that you need to rethink your odds and count of planets rather badly.
Credible quantitative estimates suggest at least tens of millions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy alone, and these estimates are probably tremendously conservative. I personally think that it is plausible that nearly every second generation star has planets. We currently have great difficulty resolving planets the size of earth (inferred at best from counter-rotation of the star about a center of mass, a tiny effect that is really only visible for very large, Jupiter-scale planets). Well, if there are a trillion galaxies with ten million stars that have planets and we take our solar system as a template that suggests that each such star has ballpark of ten planets, there are likely to be (well over) 10^8*10^12 = 10^20 planets in the visible universe alone, and I wouldn't be surprised if the number were closer to 10^22 or 10^23 (an average of one planet per 100 stars, say).
The point is that the Universe is vast. Really vast. There are more stars than there are grains of sand on all the beaches of the world, and most of these stars have no purpose as far as humans of this planet are concerned beyond being completely invisible unless we work very hard to see them -- they are completely inaccessible. If God made the Earth the center of the universe and created the stars just for us, he sure wasted a whole lot of time and energy, y'think?
The point being that your argument is way too gentle. There are very probably at least thousands of earth-like planets in this one galaxy that are even of a similar age and natural history and may well harbor similar life, evolved from similar beginnings. That's why SETI is based on a credible hypothesis, although detecting radio waves from other intelligent civilizations is nearly impossible at the outset unless those civilizations go out of their way to broadcast into the void, a very expensive proposition and something that we have yet to do. If we drove a radio signal with a gigawatt of power (that is, driven by its very own state-scale power plant) then by the time one is just ONE light year away (10^16 meters) the power in the signal is down to 10^-24 watts/square meter. A millionth of a billionth of a billionth of a watt/square meter, which is not, actually a very large signal or easy to detect. And by the time one gets to the nearest star it is an order of magnitude weaker and falling fast.
As far as the tuning of constants for human life etc -- here I am open minded. The problem is that there are many ways to compute the probability that are based on different prior assumptions. All of these are equally "valid" in that no set of assumptions can be proven -- they are axioms that cannot be strengthened or weakened by experiment (at least, not by any experiment we can perform now, probably ever).
For example, if one assumes that our spacetime continuum is just one out of a possibly infinite set of "parallel" spacetime continua, all of them with unique sets of physical constants that are themselves distributed your choice of randomly or according to some metaphysical rule, then one cannot be surprised that some of them (even, depending on the rule, all of them) have constants compatible with life not as evidence of sentient design but as evidence of either mechanical process or "random chance".
Comments: Note that I do not use the term "created" spacetimes because there is no evidence that creation has ever occurred and on a Universal scale it is very difficult to see how it could ever occur. Perhaps it is difficult to grasp a possible infinity of possibly infinite space-time continua existing without beginning and without end, merely changing. It is a whole lot harder to grasp there being nothing at all and then something (especially when the "time" in which this sort of change occurs is itself something, when the "place" in which it occurs is something).
Comments: I don't really know what the word "random" means. There is no evidence that anything is truly random, and considerable evidence that nothing is random. The idea that spacetime continua (however many there might be) get their physical constants randomly is a bit disturbing as well, even though either way one has the usual recursive problem of where the constants that set the values of the constants came from and why they are what they are.
If you get right down to it, this is why I am a panendeist, specifically, instead of an atheist. IMO it is infinitely unlikely that there exists only ONE spacetime continuum AND that it has just the right set of constants that lead to the possibility of self-organized self-aware life (such as ourselves). You then pays your money and takes your choice -- either there are an infinity of such STCs with a universal aleph-2 metaphysics that is almost certainly capable of self-organization and hence true sentience (although with an intelligence that is quite possibly beyond our ability to grasp, given that we can BARELY grasp the mechanism of self-aware intelligence driven by mundane things like electrobiochemistry on an evolved substrate) -- or there is just one STC and it "just happens" that it has the right parameters, which is so unlikely that it beggars the imagination and pushes one to hypothesize a STC-spanning self-consistent LOCAL intellgence -- this would technically be pandeism and not panendeism. Truthfully, I find the latter a bit more difficult to work with conceptually -- there are entropy problems with a closed universe that make it difficult to conclude that our single STC is in any meaningful sense intelligent, although I do have at least one theoretical model for it that isn't as big as an aleph-2 multiverse but isn't as small as "only" 4 dimensional spacetime that would work, and that might even manage the entropy component.
So I'm not convinced by your second argument. BOTH ways of arguing are mind-projection fallacy, but one is IMO a narrower one and hence is a worse assumption from an information theoretic point of view. Aleph-2 multiverse very definitely maximizes entropy and is large enough that "anything can happen".
rgb
God is a lie.
yeah, i just w..."
i think relegion is the most important things!!!
coz, without a religion we like doesnt have a road to way.
i see him like in the air, no destiny.
wht is your religion?
idk, i just not agree if he make a science to be THE ONLY ONE REASON to doesnt have a religion.