Posted on 08/01/2005 10:58:13 AM PDT by wallcrawlr
The half-century campaign to eradicate any vestige of religion from public life has run its course. The backlash from a nation fed up with the A.C.L.U. kicking crèches out of municipal Christmas displays has created a new balance. State-supported universities may subsidize the activities of student religious groups. Monuments inscribed with the Ten Commandments are permitted on government grounds. The Federal Government is engaged in a major antipoverty initiative that gives money to churches. Religion is back out of the closet.
But nothing could do more to undermine this most salutary restoration than the new and gratuitous attempts to invade science, and most particularly evolution, with religion. Have we learned nothing? In Kansas, conservative school-board members are attempting to rewrite statewide standards for teaching evolution to make sure that creationism's modern stepchild, intelligent design, infiltrates the curriculum. Similar anti-Darwinian mandates are already in place in Ohio and are being fought over in 20 states. And then, as if to second the evangelical push for this tarted-up version of creationism, out of the blue appears a declaration from Christoph Cardinal Schönborn of Vienna, a man very close to the Pope, asserting that the supposed acceptance of evolution by John Paul II is mistaken. In fact, he says, the Roman Catholic Church rejects "neo-Darwinism" with the declaration that an "unguided evolutionary process--one that falls outside the bounds of divine providence--simply cannot exist."
Cannot? On what scientific evidence? Evolution is one of the most powerful and elegant theories in all of human science and the bedrock of all modern biology. Schönborn's proclamation that it cannot exist unguided--that it is driven by an intelligent designer pushing and pulling and planning and shaping the process along the way--is a perfectly legitimate statement of faith. If he and the Evangelicals just stopped there and asked that intelligent design be included in a religion curriculum, I would support them. The scandal is to teach this as science--to pretend, as does Schönborn, that his statement of faith is a defense of science. "The Catholic Church," he says, "will again defend human reason" against "scientific theories that try to explain away the appearance of design as the result of 'chance and necessity,'" which "are not scientific at all." Well, if you believe that science is reason and that reason begins with recognizing the existence of an immanent providence, then this is science. But, of course, it is not. This is faith disguised as science. Science begins not with first principles but with observation and experimentation.
In this slippery slide from "reason" to science, Schönborn is a direct descendant of the early 17th century Dutch clergyman and astronomer David Fabricius, who could not accept Johannes Kepler's discovery of elliptical planetary orbits. Why? Because the circle is so pure and perfect that reason must reject anything less. "With your ellipse," Fabricius wrote Kepler, "you abolish the circularity and uniformity of the motions, which appears to me increasingly absurd the more profoundly I think about it." No matter that, using Tycho Brahe's most exhaustive astronomical observations in history, Kepler had empirically demonstrated that the planets orbit elliptically.
This conflict between faith and science had mercifully abated over the past four centuries as each grew to permit the other its own independent sphere. What we are witnessing now is a frontier violation by the forces of religion. This new attack claims that because there are gaps in evolution, they therefore must be filled by a divine intelligent designer.
How many times do we have to rerun the Scopes "monkey trial"? There are gaps in science everywhere. Are we to fill them all with divinity? There were gaps in Newton's universe. They were ultimately filled by Einstein's revisions. There are gaps in Einstein's universe, great chasms between it and quantum theory. Perhaps they are filled by God. Perhaps not. But it is certainly not science to merely declare it so.
To teach faith as science is to undermine the very idea of science, which is the acquisition of new knowledge through hypothesis, experimentation and evidence. To teach it as science is to encourage the supercilious caricature of America as a nation in the thrall of religious authority. To teach it as science is to discredit the welcome recent advances in permitting the public expression of religion. Faith can and should be proclaimed from every mountaintop and city square. But it has no place in science class. To impose it on the teaching of evolution is not just to invite ridicule but to earn it.
I disagree.
The model being correct does not mean that the laws of physics have broken down. (At least the model I'm speaking of.)
Gene pool mixing.
The particulars of the model don't matter in the least. If you claim you've got the physics and math right, then failure(an answer of zero)means what it does.
That's proof. A statement simply saying you disagree means nothing. You must show how it is not correct.
where Pobservation(by laws of physics) is the probability for the observed event to occur.
Insufficient, not broken down.
You've lost me, spunk.
Just because Galileo's model was better that didn't change the laws of physics on way or the other.
But of course, the "model" you are speaking of is necessarily "not zero", so the point made by spunkets is accurate. Unless you have some other definition of "effectively zero".
It's obvious what you prefer. It's also obvious you'll do anything whatsoever to attain it. That's why I was simply amazed at the path and creativity.
My 9 year old grandson claims I think too much.
That would be helpful. When I'm done my paper may I forward it to you to check my math?
I must be on a different page than you.
Why does "effectively zero" chance for the inanimate to animate debate mean that the laws of physics have broken down?
About my 8th hour today.
That's why my butt is so big.
Alright then. Why did you completely drop the subject of Darwin and Marx and instead bring up a totally irrelevant and out-of-context Patterson quote?
If you really do have enough knowledge and understanding of the physical laws, to create a model that will give you an answer. That answer must be what you observe.
Newton's law is a particular case of general reletivity by the correspondance principle. As long as the conditions are such that Newton's law applies, the answers arrived at from calculations are fine. Once you don't have those conditions the answers suck. In this case the model(the math) is wrong.
Now if you make calculations in GR and the answer disagrees with reality, either your understanding of nature is wrong(bad model), or their's some unseen force acting. In order to claim an intelligent unseen force is there, you must abandon immediately any idea that your understanding of the physics is wrong(bad model). You must claim perfection. In that way you can introduce your intel guy, but once done, you must also acknowledge that the laws of physics are insufficient to govern the world. The intel guy is not a law of physics.
Doesn't follow.
My knowing that a greater intelligence exists doesn't change either my ability or the laws of physics.
effectively zero probability is little different than zero probability. We're saying it has a overwhelmingly remote to zero chance of showing up.
1 means the event will happen absolutely and zero means it will never happen.
You still seem to be having trouble.
If it is from a fair draw each tickets has the same probability of winning. If there are enough tickets sold to cover all possibilities, one ticket will win. In this case the probability of someone winning is one. If you select a specific ticket beforehand which you desire to win, the odds are definitely against it winning. I think this is where your misunderstanding occurs. There is a difference when considering a specific pre-chosen ticket and any non-specific ticket from the group.
The calculations I've seen of abiogenesis make a similar mistake. One specific DNA sequence, RNA sequence, Amino acid sequence, or whatever is chosen as the desired outcome. When this is done the probability is unbelievably small. If however you state beforehand that any one of the possible sequences will satisfy the desired outcome, the probability becomes one. When applied to reality, we know that not all sequences will satisfy the desired outcome, in this case support life. We would be silly to suppose that only one sequence could, especially if you consider DNA and RNA since we find so many different sequences in living organisms. We know from this that there must be a number, or number range, of possible sequences that will satisfy the desired outcome.
The problem is we do not know what that desired outcome should be. This makes the entire calculation irrelevant. Sorry for yelling, but I wanted you to focus on that one phrase and understand what it means.
Sounds like a sound strategy.
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