Posted on 09/20/2006 9:51:34 AM PDT by SirLinksalot
*And God became ape, dittoes.
Actually continental drift is a fact and plate tectonics is an explanatory theory.
I happen to have taken geology just a few years before plate tectonics was accepted. I can assure you that continental drift was taken quite seriously. Several days of freshman geology was devoted to the supporting evidence, even though there was no known mechanism to make it possible.
Again, you have mistaken the fact that continents move for the theory that explains the movement.
There is a parallel in evolution. Successive replacement of species was widely accepted long before Darwin. What Darwin offered was not the fact of change in species, but an explanatory theory.
It's anti-science to make flat-out assertions without evidence to back them up. "None of the above" is very hard to reconcile with the evidence, since, as has been pointed out before, the creationists themselves disagree whether some of these guys are in the "non-human ape baramin" or the "human baramin". If nothing else, that establishes that H. erectus, H. ergaster, et al, are neither clearly non-human nor clearly human.
Good points. IIRC, part of the evidence that Africa and S. America split apart was the distribution of plants and animals on either side, as well as the way the rocks match up.
I very much doubt the egomaniacal collection of human horrors you've assembled would agree with me about their status as first worm-food, and then later a worm substance of a different sort. If nothing else, their monumental egos would not permit them to contemplate such a fate.
Condemnation to eternal torment implies a life eternal necessary for the contemplated punishment to be inflicted. That's the problem with earthly visions of heavenly consequences; they can easily entrap us in a paradox of our own human invention. I can see that you might feel cheated at the prospect that such villians could avoid eternal torment by escaping into eternal oblivion, but I must disagree with the idea that eternal oblivion can not constitute eternal damnation.
"A firm belief in God and submission to Him: Don't leave earth without it!"
Exactly my point. That misanthropic assemblage you've concocted for our amusment won't be leaving Earth . . . ever . . . and decomposition will, finally, be turning them into something useful.
With all due respect, for scientists the reading skills as exhibited here are certainly poor. I started off saying in post 257 that scientists have set agendas, just as everyone else does. Now people would like me to explain black holes, quantum tunneling, and continental drifts. Honestly.
If one would take the time to read my post, these are NOT my example in regards to continental drifts. Rather, they are references from the research of Thomas Kuhn and detailed in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions on scientific consensus and minority opinion. I cannot vouch for continental drifts nor have I read Dr. Kuhn's book. However, I'm sure Dr. Kuhn could provide you with further information if you believe him to be at odds with the scientific community. I would also recommend writing Wikipedia and have the reference pulled.
Dr. Kuhn seems to support my statement and I stand by that statement until scientifically proven otherwise.
There's no usage police for words like hypothesis and theory and law, except possibly among journal editors.
Problems arise when someone tries to argue from definitions. It just doesn't work. Scientists know the categories, even if they sometimes get sloppy in informal writing.
The simplest way of thinking about this is to accept that all categories of knowledge in science progress. There are no statements in science that are not susceptible to being replaced by more comprehensive statements.
Well Kuhn himself won't, because he's dead.
FWIW, I've spoken to a number of scientists who've read Kuhn's book, and I don't think I ever met one who thought much of it.
Sounds like he was one of those minority thinkers.
That does explain a lot. I'm a definition type of guy; not a category. Be thankful I'm not categorizing global warming. I'd still be working out the definitions.
Beats me. As his fellow philosophers; I'm just a scientist.
A sociologist might be the top world expert on some aboriginal tribe someplace, and still not have anything useful to teach the tribesmen about what it's like to be a tribesman.
Oh but it's not. It's just looking at the evidence with a stricter and more skeptical set of assumptions.
You find fossils in a particular strata and if you believe in evolution you assume those fossils were the ancestor of something. If you don't believe in evolution, you might consider that those fossils belonged to something that never evolved but went extinct. Or you might think some evolution occurred but it is still basically the same creature as one still with us.
A scientist finds a fossil and he has questions for it. A creationist finds a fossil and he has dismissals for it.
Creationism has nothing to teach us.
OK, by your estimation, what *is* that worth? Are surveys of scientists worth more than any other poll? Or should Kuhn's assertions be vetted like any other? (OK, since Kuhn is talking about what could be called "philosophy of" or "sociology of" science, that might be harder to pull off).
But you get the point...
Cheers!
The conclusion that I draw is that they are clearly neither one nor the other, that they are in fact intermediate.
These aren't biologists with their funky assumptions who can't fit them in one bin or the other; these are creationists, who claim it can be done, but are in fact unable to do so. (Actually, they can, it's just that they don't agree!)
Interesting Chesterton quote in this regard, from The Noticeable Conduct of Professor Chadd (which was in his The Club of Queer Trades):
Chadd had just contributed to a magazine an article called "Zulu Interests and the New Makango Frontier', in which a precise scientific report of his study of the customs of the people of T'Chaka was reinforced by a severe protest against certain interferences with these customs both by the British and the Germans. He-was sitting with the magazine in front of him, the lamplight shining on his spectacles, a wrinkle in his forehead, not of anger, but of perplexity, as Basil Grant strode up and down the room, shaking it with his voice, with his high spirits and his heavy tread.
"It's not your opinions that I object to, my esteemed Chadd," he was saying, "it's you. You are quite right to champion the Zulus, but for all that you do not sympathize with them. No doubt you know the Zulu way of cooking tomatoes and the Zulu prayer before blowing one's nose; but for all that you don't understand them as well as I do, who don't know an assegai from an alligator. You are more learned, Chadd, but I am more Zulu. Why is it that the jolly old barbarians of this earth are always championed by people who are their antithesis? Why is it? You are sagacious, you are benevolent, you are well informed, but, Chadd, you are not savage. Live no longer under that rosy illusion. Look in the glass. Ask your sisters. Consult the librarian of the British Museum. Look at this umbrella." And he held up that sad but still respectable article. "Look at it. For ten mortal years to my certain knowledge you have carried that object under your arm, and I have no sort of doubt that you carried it at the age of eight months, and it never occurred to you to give one wild yell and hurl it like a javelin-- thus--"
And he sent the umbrella whizzing past the professor's bald head, so that it knocked over a pile of books with a crash and left a vase rocking.
Cheers!
Don't let yourself in for a cheap shot with a line like that. :-)
Cheers!
I do believe in evolution among the same species. It is ridiculous to claim that so many species evolved from one single cell organism in a bowl of primordial soup.
That is something a child would come up with to convince itself why the sky is blue.
Thanks for the note and thank you for thanking me, bb. Glad to poke my nose in, again, and to gain some of your wisdom.
As for Darwinism's ability to adjust, I don't think a philosophy does; it just stays where it is and people go on. And as for Darwinist Fundamentalists adjusting much, well, the impetus of their belief doesn't come from science, as we know, so why should science change them at the core?
Why would the sociologist want to teach tribesmen about what it's like to be a tribesman? This seems to be a mistated analogy.
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