Posted on 02/13/2004 3:14:29 AM PST by The Raven
Edited on 04/22/2004 11:51:05 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
Even before Darwin, critics attacked the idea of biological evolution with one or another version of, "Evolve this!"
Whether they invoked a human, an eye, or the whip-like flagella that propel bacteria and sperm, the contention that natural processes of mutation and natural selection cannot explain the complexity of living things has been alive and well for 200 years.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Back at post 192, balrog666 said:
Others (I am one) say that God the Creator exists outside of space and time and thus there is no beginning for God, i.e. the creation is not something in which the Creator exists. There is no "before" the big bang or any multi-verse or dimensional parallel in ekpyrotic cosmology.
This is another area wherein each person must work out his own understanding. Mine is somewhat unique but is based on the Word, Jewish tradition and science:
I pondered on this state at length and deduced that God must have wanted to reveal Himself and thus there was a beginning.
Then I pondered how God would go about revealing Himself. I deduced He would create beings who could think to whom He would reveal Himself and would commune. I further deduced how He would go about communicating Himself to these beings, i.e. that He is good and truth and so forth.
These attributes would have no meaning in any language unless they were set in contrast to what they are not. (How would you know if you are happy if you have never been sad?) Thus, I pondered that He would create good and evil, love and hate, et al so that a language could be formed, the Word.
I then pondered He would communicate His will to the thinking beings so they would know Him. I also pondered that, for the words to have meaning, He would give them numerous manifestations of all these contrasts - space/time, geometry, particles, energy, matter, creatures.
One of the ideas of the Jewish Kabbalah that rings true to my spirit is that the Scriptures are another name for God, i.e. it reveals who He is. So I see all of creation - spiritual and material - and the Word as God revealing Himself.
I conclude that Adam and all the other heavenly creatures were to be spectators of the physical realm for the purpose of knowing God.
Enter Satan, beautiful and thinking being as he is, decided he ought to exalted. He became "aware" of his beauty and self and thus was at odds with God's will for him.
Likewise, Adam and Eve became "aware" of themselves and sought to be more by gaining the knowledge of good and evil. So likewise, they were at odds with God's will for them and were banished to mortality, i.e. they became a part of the story instead of the spectators, and thereby were out of communion with God.
When it is all said and done I see us restored to what was intended at the beginning, we will be the thinking beings to whom God reveals Himself and with whom He communes. His will is what matters over all else. The Lord's Prayer reveals as much, the meaning of life and the purpose of our existence:
The way it was covered in one of my theology courses (fun part was the Rabbi who was a co-professor during the Old Testament) is that there were three oral traditions that were written down at different times - Judaic, Priestly, and Essene, I believe. The version of the the creation which has man in the middle was written during time the Hebrews were enslaved by the Babylonians and the version with man in dominion was written when the Hebrews had established their kingdom and were a power in the region. So, each version had a point, one to reassure slaves and one to justify their power. He also presented versions of Genesis that had all three creation stories.
Well, sure, to about the extent that conjugation in english grammar involves deduction. However, when it comes to the big cahuna theories in science, the game is confidance due to repeated demonstrations, which is induction, not proof. For that matter, the use of deduction, in and of itself, is not proof. A proof involves quite a lot of rig-a-marole surrounding the formal construction of a system of axioms and predicates, and establishing a methodical tabular presentation of the connection between the fundamental predicates, acted upon by the axioms, to produce the proof of the hypothesis.
Ain't never seen no such animal in any journal of the natural sciences nowhere.
Not really. The method of experimentation and observation do have an inductive quality. If I kick a ball up, it should come down because yesterday, I kicked a ball and it came down..
But once theories are used to explain - Law of gravity holds that in a gravity field, what goes "up" must come "down." So a ball kicked up will always come down. This is an application of deductive reasoning.
...to engineering. The theory, however, is accepted and re-inforced because of continuing confirmation, due to our faith in inductive reasoning. There is no deductive proof that a ball kicked up will always come down, just because you can use that phrase as a predicate of a deductive set of statements.
Putting it another way: you can do deduction until you are blue in the face on false facts and theories, and you can get prefectly logically consistent results. You need some other mechanism than deductive logic to assess the value of the predicates and theories you may be doing deductive logic on.
There's a couple problems with this.
One, you are applying an overly strict usage of deductive reasoning that seems to be coming from a mathematical perspective, Euclidean even, or an upper level logic course. This is not the more 'common' version that science uses. Perhaps this might help to illustrate. Deductive reasoning is using a theory to explain a specific occurrence such as the gravity example. It is using the known general idea to go to the specific. This is the explanatory method used in science and also to predict. The classic misuse being "All bald and middle aged men are mature - Bob in the office is bald and 45 - therefor Bob will be mature."
Two, your use of proof is not correct for the sciences. Again, you are using mathematical or college class logic proof. In science, repeated demonstration is proof. For example in my time as a researcher, I wanted to prove that drug A was able to inhibit the release of hormone X. I administered drug A to a rat and measured the level of hormone X. It went down. This is not proof that drug A caused the lowering of hormone X. I had to administer the drug to many groups of rats. Since each group showed a decrease each time, I had my proof that drug A inhibited the release of hormone X. When tying the action to a specific receptor, I had to administer a receptor inhibitor before administering the drug and repeatedly show that the inhibitor prevented the drop of hormone X. Again, the repeated observations were my proof. I published, another lab did the repeated observations and I had my validation.
In science, if A leads to B once. It means nothing. But if you repeatedly do A, predicting that B will occur, and B does occur. You have your proof. The experiment must be repeated enough times to show that it wasn't a singular occurrence or a fluke. Then your results must be reproducible. That is how research in science works.
The case of the drug, inductive reasoning was that drug A inhibits hormone B because it did so every time I tried it. Then deductive reasoning, drug A is of drug class WW, so every time I use a drug of class WW, hormone X will be inhibited. This was the next step. Use other drugs of that class predicting that they will inhibit hormone X. They did.
So, science uses both inductive to go from observation to general rule and then deductive to use the general rule to predict specifics.
This is an ASSUMPTION (or opinion) by those with an "E" worldview.
Then just HOW, does the SMALL population (mutants from ONE set of parents) [Hey! Great punk rock band name!] manage to get PAST the SMALL POPULATION EXTINCTION THREAT BARRIER?
And that's the argument, isn't it? How could 3/4 of a flagellum be of benefit to the organism?
I know what you mean, js1138. Suffice to say such-like might be in for a Big Surprise one day. :^) Good to hear from you!
No, you do not. Not in a formal sense, or in a practical sense either. The myriad of observations, over 200 years, of the efficacy of Newtonian physics did not prevent it from being superceded in astro-physics by Einsteinian physics.
I had to administer the drug to many groups of rats. Since each group showed a decrease each time, I had my proof
You did not have a proof, except in the half-baked way lawyers use the word. You increased your confidence to a high level. You did not make the contention in question unassailable.
This is, I aver, a poor usage, under the circumstances of trying to explain science to creationists, who keep insisting that that the theory of evolution has not been proved. In that it has not.
The experiment must be repeated enough times to show that it wasn't a singular occurrence or a fluke. Then your results must be reproducible. That is how research in science works.
Indeed--without recourse to proof.
That is because evolution is a scientific theory, which is allowed in government schools, whereas christianity is a religeous othodoxy, which is forbidden in government schools, for the very good reason that our founding fathers did not want to go back to the days when your religeous beliefs could get you garroted, quartered, or burned at the stake.
My genes came from my parents. I did not invent them. Period. They exist in my parents.
Actually it is a conclusion - the short nosed versions died out while the long ones survived.
In your grotesque ignorance - try to realize that evolution is science - a pursuit of knowledge and understanding. It's too bad that your version of godliness requires object ignorance. It is your prejudice that screams false science since it threatens your control.
Evolution dominates in public schools, while Christianity is continuously suppressed. In your language, this would be called "atheistic totalitarianism".
In this country, religion is taught in churches while science is taught in the schools. Religion and only religiously approved subjects is the hallmark of nations like Iran, not the USA.
You are free to worship as you choose but you are NOT free to force others to adhere to your beliefs.
Nations thrive when they have moral and spiritual discipline. They die when they listen to fools like you.
Nations do thrive with moral and spiritual balance but are destroyed when fanatics like you go marching in their jackboots in the name of God.
Newtonian physics still hold true in the Newtonian framework. Einstein widen the framework, the scope, included more variables, and came up with mathematical explanations to include the new variables.
In chemistry, the Ideal Gas Law was developed and used for 100 years. In is an excellent predictor for ideal conditions. Beyond that, the interactions of the weak molecular forces become significant. New laws to describe these interactions had to be developed. But under the the ideal conditions - ideal being the temperature and pressure range not the semantic ideal - the Ideal Gas Law works.
You did not have a proof, except in the half-baked way lawyers use the word. You increased your confidence to a high level. You did not make the contention in question unassailable.
You're failing to see the point. In the practical world of science, that is proof. If a scientist is asked, where is your proof, he lists his experimental results and cites those of others. This is, I aver, a poor usage, under the circumstances of trying to explain science to creationists, who keep insisting that that the theory of evolution has not been proved. In that it has not.
Not so. I would say the opposite is true. It is the semantic games with the word "proof" that confound the issue. The games are played by the creationists to purposely create false arguments. If I hold out a book in my hand and say, this book will fall to the floor if I release it. The creationist will say, prove it. I let the book go - it hits the floor. I pick the book up, let it go - it hits the floor. Do it a few more times. To a scientist, I have proved my statement. The creationist will say, and you are arguing, well, you didn't prove that it will hit the floor, you only showed that the times you dropped it, it hit the floor.
That is simply not the way science works - definitely not in biological sciences.
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