Posted on 07/24/2003 1:55:39 PM PDT by Mr.Atos
I was just lisening to Medved debating Creationism with Athiests on the air. I found it interesting that while Medved argued his side quite effectively from the standpoint of faith, his opponents resorted to condescension and beliitled him with statements like, "when it rains, is that God crying?" I was reminded of the best (at least most amusing)debate that I have ever heard on the subject of Creationism vs Evolution, albeit a fictional setting. It occurred on the show, Friends of all places between the characters Pheobe (The Hippy) and Ross (The Paleontologist). It went like this...
Pheebs: Okay...it's very faint, but I can still sense him in the building...GO INTO THE LIGHT MR. HECKLES!!
Ross: Whoa, whoa, whoa. What, uh, you don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: Nah. Not really. Ross: You don't believe in evolution? Pheebs: I don't know. It's just, ya know, monkeys, Darwin, ya know, it's a, it's a nice story. I just think it's a little too easy.
Ross: Uh, excuse me. Evolution is not for you to buy, Phoebe. Evolution is scientific fact. Like, like, the air we breathe, like gravity... Pheebs: Uh, okay, don't get me started on gravity.
Ross: You uh, you don't believe in gravity? Pheebs: Well, it's not so much that ya know, like I don't *believe* in it, ya know. It's just...I don't know. Lately I get the feeling that I'm not so much being pulled down, as I am being pushed.
Ross: How can you NOT BELIEVE in evolution? Pheebs: [shrugs] I unh-huh...Look at this funky shirt!!
Ross: Well, there ya go. Pheebs: Huh. So now, the REAL question is: who put those fossils there, and why...?
Ross: OPPOSABLE THUMBS!! Without evolution, how do YOU explain OPPOSABLE THUMBS?!? Pheebs: Maybe the overlords needed them to steer their spacecrafts!
Pheebs: Uh-oh! Scary Scientist Man!
Pheebs: Okay, Ross? Could you just open your mind like, *this* much?? Okay? Now wasn't there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the Earth was flat? And up until what, like, fifty years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing, until you split it open, and this like, whole mess o' crap came out! Now, are you telling me that you are so unbelievably arrogant that you can't admit that there's a teeny, tiny possibility that you could be wrong about this?!?
Pheebs: I can't believe you caved. Ross: What? Pheebs: You just ABANDONED your whole belief system! I mean, before, I didn't agree with you, but at least I respected you. Ross: But uh.. Pheebs: Yeah...how...how are you gonna go in to work tomorrow? How...how are you gonna face the other science guys? How...how are you gonna face yourself? Oh! [Ross runs away dejected] Pheebs: That was fun. So who's hungry?
I have not, but scientists have been doing just that in numerous ways and have so proven it. What alternative do you have anyway? That God creates some new genes for each person? I'd agree to that one.
BTW - the question is not why I believe the above, the question is whether it has been scientifically proven or not. The discussion arose on whether science proves anything. I would say that you have not denied the examples so you must agree that they have been proven. Oh and BTW - the above has been OBSERVED and TESTED in dozens if not hundreds of different ways.
I think I understood what you meant - that using a certain frame of reference such an argument can be made. I think perhaps you did not understand my argument that nowadays we have more than one frame of reference for testing the theory and it has been verified that way also.
I have been to more than one planetarium and I think they all were 'geocentric'. The machinery seems quite interesting too though I have not heard as good an explanation of it. I think they have been around for quite some time, certainly from before computers and it is quite amazing how they do so much.
From here:
http://www.nps.gov/flfo/High%20School%20Curiculum/web%20graphics/Intro.htm
"As with all scientific knowledge, a theory can be refined or even replaced by analternative theory in light of new and compelling evidence.
The geocentric theory that the sun revolves around the earth was replaced by the heliocentric theory of the earth's rotation on its axis and revolution around the sun. However, ideas are not referred to as "theories" in science unless they are supported by bodies of evidence that make their subsequent abandonment very unlikely. When a theory is supported by as much evidence as evolution, it is held with a very high degree of confidence.
In science, the word "hypothesis" conveys the tentativeness inherent in the common use of the word "theory.' A hypothesis is a testable statement about the natural world. Through experiment and observation, hypotheses can be supported or rejected. At the earliest level of understanding, hypotheses can be used to construct more complex inferences and explanations. Like "theory," the word "fact" has a different meaning in science than it does in common usage. A scientific fact is an observation that has been confirmed over and over. However, observations are gathered by our senses, which can never be trusted entirely. Observations also can change with better technologies or with better ways of looking at data. For example, it was held as a scientific fact for many years that human cells have 24 pairs of chromosomes, until improved techniques of microscopy revealed that they actually have 23. Ironically, facts in science often are more susceptible to change than theories, which is one reasonwhy the word "fact" is not much used in science.
Finally, "laws" in science are typically descriptions of how the physical world behaves under certain circumstances. For example, the laws of motion describe how objects move when subjected to certain forces. These laws can be very useful in supporting hypotheses and theories, but like all elements of science they can be altered with new information and observations."
I agree! Whoohooo! Those are wonderful machines. It is so cool you like them also. :-)
This is exactly the opposite of what I've said. This claim cannot be "proven" because it is a proposition about the natural world. Such propositions cannot, in their nature (because of the limitations of our knowledge) be demonstrated with certainty.
Look at it this way. The claim that "the Earth goes round the sun" is not an atomic and isolated proposition. It is embeded in a mass of theories, laws and conventions: for instance the laws of gravity, theories of optics, and conventions of geomety and of simplicity. To "prove" heliocentrism (establish it with certainty, as necessarily true) you would have to first "prove" all these other things, and to do that you'd have to first "prove" all the theories, laws and conventions that they in turn are dependent on or emeshed with.
What you end up with, then, it you take this notions of certifying the truth of empirically base claims with certainty, is a pointless morass of justifications, indeed a fetish of justificationism. Of course nobody actually does this (and all attempts to create such edifices of certainty, from scholasticism to logical positivism, were failures). What we actually do is adopt theories that are useful, illuminative, and that work for us, and we accept them and use them so long as they work, or until somebody thinks up better ones.
Definitions and semantics are not interesting to me.
This is equivalent (IMHO) to saying, "I doesn't interest me to be understood, or to understand others, and I don't mind wasting by time on confusions and misunderstanding." The point is to understand each other, and what we mean by our words, to avoid merely semantical debates.
It is YOUR intellectual fetish to hold that "generally accepted conclusions" must (or should) be "proven," not mine (or Popper's).
BTW - you cannot say that evolution is a proven fact and also say that nothing can be proven.
But I don't say "that evolution is a proven fact". In fact, in a message addressed to you, #2404, only a few previous to the one you are here responding to, I said the following:
BTW I don't consider evolution to be a "scientific fact," but then neither is heliocentrism.
Nor do I claim that "nothing can be proven". I claim thta propositions about the natural world cannot be "proven" (in the sense of demonstrated with certainty).
I've really tried to be clear on all this, but what am I to do if you reply without reading or comprehending what I've written?
I like that, RA. Good find.
The opposing view is given by Dickens' Mr. Thomas Gradgrind:
"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!"
If you narrow down the scope of any definition you can reach a point where it becomes pointless to argue -- hence the earth revolves around the sun and children get their genes from their parents.
But science seeks quantitative explanations, and Copernicus isn't good enough; Galileo isn't good enough; Kepler isn't good enough; Newton isnt good enough; and Einstein doesn't mesh with QM.
And children don't get all their genes from their parents. Mutations occur, induced by radioactivity and other mechanisms, some of which are poorly understood.
These might be trivial, depending on you need for detail. Electricians don't need QM, but chip designers do. Blue-eyed parents of a brown-eyed child might be curious about the biology of inheritance.
The orbit of the moon around the earth is an epicycle that does not in fact occur. You can prove this by plotting the motion of the moon from north of the solar system. The notion of orbit is just an artifact of our limited visual imagination.
Not bad.
Oh I won't argue that certain results can be shown to have occured, and that those results can be reliably reproduced, but what you appear to refuse to understand is that no matter how many times you reproduce a particular result, the underlying theory has STILL not been proven. The confidence in the theory will increase each time a conforming result is observed. And the expected chance of an anomalous result decreases with each iteration. But proof of a theory is an asymptotic goal.
For any theory, select examples get tested and are found to conform to the expected results. From this sample, the results are generalized to the rest of the world. Because testing every possible combination is simply not possible, science accepts a very small statistical probability that the theory will not apply in all cases. What matters is how useful a theory is to model a specific aspect of the world.
The best one can say of any theory is only that it hasn't been disproven yet.
Women have been getting the last word for a long time.
No it did not. Relying on the posting at the beginning of the thread on the Agreement, I had been under the impression that ALS had nevertheless signed on while refusing to use the troll provision himself. I had not seen his post later on where he made his position perfectly clear. I do not know if you did or not, I am not here to place blame on you or anyone:
no sorry, the agreement I signed on to "did not pass" and I clearly stated I would not support an agreement that sanctioned name calling, as everyone knows.
332 posted on 08/08/2003 7:02 PM PDT by ALS
He indeed had argued long and hard against a provision which would allow insults since he (and I and many others) thought the whole purpose of the agreement was to exactly stop such conduct. He kept to his promise and he announced it publicly. His withdrawal was thus perfectly honorable.
Next he started on the Nazi/Communist attack which he felt he was not bound not to make since he had not agreed to it. Amazingly, the evolutionists who had in part signed on because of the inclusion of that provision, instead of withdrawing from the discussion continued it -until a certain point at which I guess they deemed they were losing the discussion. Then the attacks came upon ALS as before the agreement.
Apparently to win the argument and make ALS look bad, this e-mail was posted. Let's remember one of the reasons I stated why such should not be posted - because it can in no way be verified. Thus if nothing else it breaks something agreed upon which was to substantiate charges against people so they can defend themselves.
Given all that the post looked bad and that's why it was spread around and posted. However, what has not been talked about and why this posting was doubly wrong was the circumstances on which it was sent. There has never been any love lost between you and ALS. I am as certain as that the sun comes out in the morning that the two of you had been goading each other through e-mails for a long time (even though I have not seen any such other than what has been posted here from either side - and do not want to). This e-mail was part of that goading. I know for sure that ALS wanted a proper agreement ending insults and he always insisted this provision was an attempt to break the agreement. The mail was thus to tell you you had lost instead of won, part of the ongoing goading between the two of you. Which brings me back to why e-mails should not be disclosed - being private no defense is possible - which is why it was posted and which is why the posting of private e-mails is inexcusable, should never be done and as far as i understand the agreement it is forbidden under it under the clause that no charges should be made without verification - private e-mail is by its nature unverifiable.
Finally, let me just say this, I decided to post the above for two reasons:
1. think someone's reputation has been unjustly besmirched and I want to do what I can to correct that.
2. I think the above shows quite well why private e-mails should never be posted and their use cannot be excused.
And while all can disagree as to the above being my motive, that is indeed my motive and I post it as an object lesson as to what should not be done rather than to open old wounds.
No. The agreement was almost finalized when an evolutionist came up with the troll provision. It was an evolutionist who threatened to pull out of the agreement for many days until he had his way. ALS's questioning of the provision was that it was contrary to the purpose of the agreement - to stop the insults. Let's not re-write history.
And the freepmail was just part of the ongoing goading the two of you were engaging in. It does not prove anything because only one part of that conversation has been made public.
The purpose of the agreement was to end the 'blood sport' here. Let's make sure it ends by treating each other fairly.
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