Posted on 04/20/2008 6:09:13 PM PDT by Soliton
Ben Stein was just on Fox News with Geraldo. He was asked If ID versus Evolution was a "left, right thing". He responded,"No, It's an atheist versus a non-believer thing". Stein inadvertantly admitted that ID is a religious argument, not science!
Certainly wouldn't be my first disagreement with the vatican, and unless the Lord raptures His church this very instant, I'm sure it won't be my last.
Cardinal Paul Poupard, the head of the Pontifical Council for Culture is wrong!
——So what we have now done is allow the leftists, socialists or whatever you want to call them, to claim that reason and science are their domain while freedom and liberty are based on superstition and faith. Way to go.——
The leftists, socialists or whatever you want to call them have claimed science and reason and logic as their own domain for decades. Witness the ID trial as evidence, way before this movie came out.
What is happening more and more is that people are not so convinced by “science” that is not looking for truth, rather is used to purport dogma while excluding other approaches to advance the knowledge of truth.
Science is a fluid moving target that shifts in the direction that men push it. Truth is never changing and will always stay where it is waiting for people to finally look at it.
What if science leads you to ... a Creator?
Cool! The supernatural would then become natural.
Science is a fluid moving target that shifts in the direction that men push it. Truth is never changing and will always stay where it is waiting for people to finally look at it.
Of those last two sentences, one of them fits within the definition of "dogma" and one does not. And neither one seems to agree with the first sentence as to which is which.
——Of those last two sentences, one of them fits within the definition of “dogma” and one does not. And neither one seems to agree with the first sentence as to which is which.——
If you consider science truth, you would be right.
If that is what the evidence shows I will admit that I am wrong. But, if it does, it will most likely not be the Creator you wish it to be.
Science is the search for truth. Dogma declares it to be found.
——Science is the search for truth. Dogma declares it to be found.——
Science is not the search for truth. Not when men with dogmas are involved. That goes for everyone, evo/crevo, ID etc.
That is what Ben Stein is pointing out. There is no such thing as the pure discipline of science as practiced in academia, because there is a core of dogmatic evolutionists that control how science is conducted.
I’ll grant you there is no pure objectivity. It is a human failing. As for the rest, I suspect that of the groups mentioned, if you polled them all with the single question “Can you state unequivocally and without reservatoin you cannot be wrong?” you will get considerably fewer affirmations percentage wise from the scientific community than the theological community.
Markov chain: yes. However, you must consider the configuration states of alleles in a phase space in order to have stochastic (conditional) independence. I am obviously speaking very loosely in these posts.
Laws of Thermodyanics apply to all macroscopic systems. One thing that people don't understand is that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is not a fundamental law in the same sense that the 1st law is. The first law is just a restatement of the law of conservation of energy. As such, it is a statement about time translation invariance. This is a symmetry, like the conservation of electric charge, which we believe to be exact.
The 2nd law is fundamentally a statement about the number of microstates in a statistical configuration; it is not even about disorder,per se although there are many scientists who believe entropy is a "measure of disorder." Most of the time it is, but it really doesn't have to be unless you make a very expansive definition of what disorder is (essentially just claiming [dis]order is what entropy measures). What we call entropy does not manifest itself in either classical mechanics or quantum mechanics in the operation of basic laws; it appears to be an ergodic result. That is, something seen when very large numbers of configurations are averaged. Furthermore, the claim that entropy in macroscopic systems always increases only holds if the system encompasses the entire space-time region where energy is conserved. That was my point and this is the error made by those who argue evolution impossible on this basis. Your brain is decreasing the entropy along the neural connections necessary to "think a thought." If you confine the system to that pathway, there appears to be a 2nd law violation. But your brain is also creating waste heat much larger than the negative entropy change involved in thinking. When we include that heat, the total entropy change of the universe is positive, as required.
Draw a box around the earth, and you're creating a region in which entropy will not in the aggregate increase. Why? because there is a net flux of energy into that box from the sun. If you call that imaginary box a "system" it is not a system in which energy is conserved.
On God's side: OK. But keep in mind that ID and Young Earth Creationism are not the same thing, so you may need to define your God a bit more carefully before I'm willing to say I'm on your side. "Intelligent Design" in a generic sense is inoffensive to most atheist/agnostic scientists (at least those who are intellectually honest) and it's enthusasistically (and heterodoxically) embraced by most scientists who are believers--even those who are evolutionary biologists. Contrary to a claim made early in this thread, Young Earth Creationism is not only wrong scientifically, it's also well outside the mainstream of orthodox Judaism and Christianity. Many people refuse to acknowledge they are ID'ers because they're afraid it throws them into a cage with Young Earth Creationists.
Even you do not believe what you typed, do you? If so, please provide legitimate reference.
That is not a function of the truth though. Truth will pass every test that applies to it.
Men of all stripes may have difficulty recognizing truth(that perfect circles have a round component to them we should be able to all agree on)and some will deny even that which is apparent to most everyone else.
The faith component in science and theology is strong in both disciplines, and only when it is completely understood that faith does not = truth can both disciplines rely on one another for support to get at the fundamental truths that explain our existence.
Reasons other than the committed search for truth are what drive many apart, such and competition for funding and differing conclusions from faith that determine worldview and even political endeavors.
In acedemia, this should be less of a problem.
What tests can be applied to Genesis?
——Hitler believed he was following the teachings of Jesus to their logical conclusions, too.-—— Non-Sequitur
——Even you do not believe what you typed, do you? If so, please provide legitimate reference.—— Texas Songwriter
Because Hitler, as most politicians do, probably voiced what he hoped could gain traction in the populace while not holding those views himself, we probably don’t know exactly what he thought by what he said in public.
Suffice it to say that Jesus did not preach Genocide, and Darwin alluded to it while dismissing it as morally beneath civilized society.
I agree. Only God knows.
Except that most aren't.
I know, damn details that prove you wrong are a bit of an annoyance, but they do exist.
——What tests can be applied to Genesis?——
Genesis is not directly testable, just like evolution is not directly testable. Many disciplines are using the same research to help develop more understanding of our existence, while trying to use those pieces of the puzzle to develop differing pictures.
Many disciplines would like more funding to research other avenues that more directly support pieces of the puzzle that they want to understand in more detail. This is where it takes discipline in the academic world not to let dogma dictate who gets what.
I agree that the only way to read Genesis One without abusing the text is to read it as stating that God created everything in six literal days. This is why I am a young earth creationist. I also don’t understand how people can totally split what they believe about their faith from what they believe about science. For me, my faith is either true or false. If someone can prove that the Bible is false then I will reject it. However, so far, every challange that I have seen made against the Bible has a good answer and many discoveries in archeology and science have validated the Bible.
However, we do have to be a little carefull about our definitions here. ID is different from young earth creationism in that it doesn’t take any position on when or how the earth was created. Instead, ID’s one and only conclusion is that some intelligent being was involved in the creation of life and the complex biological machines that we see in nature.
DG, at what point do evolutionists believe that a “god” had to have intervened for things to proceed? Oh, there is no point, is there? Thus, the naturalists are merely promoting an empty, despairing view of the history of life. They think that you “Christian evolutionists” are deluding yourselves, and I believe they are right. If only these High Priests of Darwinism could point to scientific evidence to support what they think, I could accept that there is more than religiously hostile speculation at work. Blessings, Bob
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