"Live long and prosper."
Posted on 09/20/2005 7:02:45 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
ITHACA, N.Y. - Lenore Durkee, a retired biology professor, was volunteering as a docent at the Museum of the Earth here when she was confronted by a group of seven or eight people, creationists eager to challenge the museum exhibitions on evolution.
They peppered Dr. Durkee with questions about everything from techniques for dating fossils to the second law of thermodynamics, their queries coming so thick and fast that she found it hard to reply.
After about 45 minutes, "I told them I needed to take a break," she recalled. "My mouth was dry."
That encounter and others like it provided the impetus for a training session here in August. Dr. Durkee and scores of other volunteers and staff members from the museum and elsewhere crowded into a meeting room to hear advice from the museum director, Warren D. Allmon, on ways to deal with visitors who reject settled precepts of science on religious grounds.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
I wouldn't go so far as to say that science is completely credible, but when people want respect, they claim to be scientific. There are at least two IRS certified religions that have incorporated science in their names.
No one seems to use science as a pejorative.
That doesn't just apply to the creationist/scientist debate. Look at the number of quacks who use scientific-sounding words and terminology to hoodwink people into buying their particular snake-oil.
Didn't the late Sen. William Proxmire opine that the only science he ever took was ex-lax? From my readings it appears he was virulently anti-science and used the word as a perjorative every chance he got.
Junk science and the fringes of social science all want the trust that is associated with science. It isn't easy keeping the arena of ideas clean.
Which is why biology doesn't want another cowbird in its nest.
The geocentric model was dropped because the data gathered with improved telescopes couldn't be reconciled to it. The heliocentric model fit easily with the data with almost no effort.
Proxmire had his golden fleece awards for research projects. Most of them were awarded on the basis of silly sounding names. I don't know how many were deserved, but I do know that parading silly sounding project names was an effective propaganda tool.
Another space alien disciple.
;^)
If you are asking me how to have kinky, computational sex...
...I won't.
Ain't Evolution WONDERFUL!
What's worse than being abducted by aliens??
Being reJECTED by aliens!
Just to be clear, a CR would keep you on the same line. In UNIX and its variants, text lines are separated by a line feed. In DOS and Windows, it's a carriage return/line feed pair.
"Live long and prosper."
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, it is a disgraceful and dangerous thing for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumably giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these topics; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn.
Those words were written 1600 years ago. I couldn't have put it better myself. The church could have avoided vast embarrassment with Galileo and Copernicus by heeding Augustine's words. It can avoid that embarrassment now too.
Kepler formulated his first two laws of planetary motion before Galileo began his telescopic observations. Granted that the sightings of Venus's phases clinched the heliocentric theory, but there's no question, even when you take hindsight out of the picture, that Kepler's model had a higher probablility of being true, because of the way a single factor (solar attraction) accounted for everything. When you have a choice between one explanation for a given phenomenon, and multiple explanations for it that involve everything working in concert, the single explanation is clearly going to be more likely.
That's your opinion, and you are welcome to it. I find celestial spheres quite a satisfactorily simple universe to operate in. Whether a given theory has Occam-ish simplicity depends on which fish you wish to fry.
Kepler's model is not "infinitely superior to Ptolemy's" any more than Einsteinian mechanics are infinitely superior to Newtonian mechanics. You can still navigate your way home Ptolemaicly.
You said that ID is a good way out of some dilemmas posed by current science.
Indeed I did. However, it takes way more homework than that to push someone's feverish opinion onto the science table as a serious scientific hypothesis, worthy of diverting any scientific resources or consideration whatsoever toward.
How is astrology a good way out of any dilemmas posed by science?
Unlike ancient astronomy, Modern astronomy totally fails to explain to individual humans what the subtle interactions of the stars predict for their personal lives. Unlike in the old days, it is hard to understand why any ordinary human would give a tinker's poop for taxpayer supported astronomy.
No, that's what Occam's razor is, by definition. Your opinion may be that Occam's razor is useless, but that's not an opinion shared by most people in the scientific community.
Kepler's model is not "infinitely superior to Ptolemy's" any more than Einsteinian mechanics are infinitely superior to Newtonian mechanics.
Einstein's mechanics are infinitely superior to Newton's. Try using Newton's formulas to figure out what would happen to the trajectory of a neutron star passing by a black hole at 0.85c.
Likewise, Ptolemy isn't going to be of much help when you see a new asteroid in the viewfinder and want to predict the path it will take.
Unlike ancient astronomy, Modern astronomy totally fails to explain to individual humans what the subtle interactions of the stars predict for their personal lives.
And astrology does explain these things? Accurately?
0x0d
1100!
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