Posted on 01/25/2005 6:15:41 PM PST by gobucks
Actually, if you go back to earlier periods, such as the time of the Roman empire, Numidians and other Africans were thought of as basically equal. The Romans used Numidian and Gaullic cavalry in similar ways, and showed no signs of thinking that the Gauls were superior to the Numidians.
In earlier times, too, the worst barbarians came from the North--first the Germans who invaded and destroyed the empire, then the Vikings who attacked the coasts of Ireland, England, France, and other civilized countries.
It was a common theory that civilization belonged to the south, and that the further north you got the stupider and more barbaric people were.
Nor did the ancients ever think of the Chinese as a lesser race. It was during the time when Chinese coolies worked on the western railroads that you began to hear that kind of nonsense, about yellow hordes and the like.
Darwin was not singlehandedly responsible for the rise of racism, but Social Darwinism played an important part in it. "Race" was an essentially scientific idea--bogus science from some points of view, although I won't argue that.
The racist version of slavery was likewise a fairly modern invention. In the ancient world, slavery was universal, but they didn't pick on a particular race to enslave. It was just the unlucky losers.
No argument from me there. Has anything other than reasonable conjecture ever shown it to be natural that one species, in time, became another? How much of the "amoeba to man" story has been confirmed by science?
Theories can be a higher level of understanding, and they can explain facts. BUT several different theories can explain most of the same set of facts (few explain all the facts), so a theory is always shaky. Newton's laws were 'gospel' for centuries but are now seen to be only a low-velocity approximation to relativistic mechanics.
That was the BEST post I have seen on the "Fact-Evidence-Hypothesis-Theory" fog. Thank you! I hope you intend to stay around and help enforce those rules (and maybe enlighten us some more). Are you a tecaher? That was an excellent description of the issue.
Evangelicals claim to be a sliver between old line protestants and fundamentalists. They say old line protestants belevie less in God than them but that is not really true.
There was a article on FR in the last two weeks written by half a dozen evangelicals. (You can find it by typing in rocketman and seaching my posts if you are interested) In the article these evangelical leaders claim they belevie in the bible as the word of God. They claim they are the defenders of the faith but they tell us that they beleive that Genesis and other passages are myth and based on legend that may have some seed of truth mixed in. These people say (Though not in the article) that the miracles occurred by natual means example: The manna in the wilderness was ant or termite eggs. The red sea parting was a lunar tidal event with lots of wind, etc. They tell us that God is a mindless vapour -- a cosmic conciousness. He has no hands feet voice -- that scripture mentioning these atributes is false and they are actually anthropormorphisms written only so we can thing we can relate with God (Omiting the words in genesis that we are created in the image and likeness of God That we look outwardly and think somewhat like God.)
These same people tell us that other tahn Jesus and the Apsotles that the early christians were barbaric pagans and that men over time were able to build christainity into the great moral religion that it is today.
Or we can say that they belevie that God in the bible is the creation of man.
Now, no self respecting Roman Catholic No believeing Jew, No Demoninational Protestant, no fundamentalist pentecostal or charismatic could ever with conciousence say any of these things, either about the bible, God, or their faith in God. The only people that are close to this are humanists and so while evangelicals call themselves less legalistic fundamentalists -- We have to say they are humanists and that they like the New Testament and a few select passages as moral humanist literature.
"Evolutionism is a fairy tale for grownups. This theory has helped nothing in the progress of science. It is useless." Prof. Louis Bounoure (Former President of the Biological Society of Strasbourg and Director of the Strasbourg Zoological Museum, later Director of Research at the French National Centre of Scientific Research), as quoted in The Advocate, Thursday 8 March 1984, p. 17
"I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution especially the extent to which it's been applied, will be one of the great jokes in the history books of the future. posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity that it has." Malcolm Muggeridge (world famous journalist and philosopher), Pascal Lectures, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
No, the moon may still be made of green cheese -- the Appollo folks may have just landed on the outer covering of the cheese. All you can say is that your hypothesis is neither confirmed nor rejected by the facts currently available. Newtonian mechanics was not rejected by facts until the motion of objects at close to the speed of light was examined.
Oh, well, that proves it. I'm going to ignore all those other people out there.....
I must have missed that in Sunday School. Where does it say that the animals were immortal before Adam sinned?
He was.
However, randomly generated mutations do act like diffusion. There are no "charastics" for diffusion equations. Things happen at all scales.
The article is correct, but incomplete. Theories explain a set of obsrevations or facts. What a theory may eventually graduate to, after extensive testing and firm belief in its correctness, is a Law. Like Newton's Laws of Motion, The Laws of Thermodynamics, or the Universal Law of Gravitation.
Not quite. Example:
An apple falls to the ground (fact)
( Next day ) An apple falls to the ground (fact)
There is an attractive force between the ground and the apple, causing it to fall ( hypothesis. OK, not quite. Sue me )
This attractive force can be explained by this relation.....(theory)
Good post. What test shows that an oak and a coyote have a common ancestor?
You are correct. I should try harder to be polite.</sarcasm>
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