Is US becoming hostile to science?

Reuters ^ | 10/28/5 | Alan Elsner

[PetroniusMaximus]

***Your in entitled to your opinion... except a pretty f***ed up interpretation of the establishment clause***

I take it you favor a Marxist reading of the establishment clause.



***Christians are doing fine. Christianity has historically thrived in the face of adversity and this is nothing compared to what early Christians faced.***

To be unaware of the dangers and deception in the age in which one lives prevents one from intellegently using the free will you spoke of earlier.

[gondramB]

Me: "***Your in entitled to your opinion... except a pretty f***ed up interpretation of the establishment clause***"

PM: "I take it you favor a Marxist reading of the establishment clause."

???

My problem with the current SC interpretation is that the founders never intended that we should lose the right of religious expression just because we are on public property.

If that's what they meant then they would not have has a chaplain in congress and would would not have put "In God we trust" on money...

This has been a productive debate, why would you start calling me names now?

[PetroniusMaximus]

***This has been a productive debate, why would you start calling me names now?***

Sorry. I misunderstood your post. I thought you were saying I was someone with, "a pretty f***ed up interpretation of the establishment clause"


***If that's what they meant then they would not have has a chaplain in congress and would would not have put "In God we trust" on money...****

Nor would signing state have had a state church.

[gondramB]

"
Sorry. I misunderstood your post. I thought you were saying I was someone with, "a pretty f***ed up interpretation of the establishment clause"


And I'm sorry I was unclear.

[The_Reader_David]

Euthanasia or florid sexual expression. Despite protestations to the contrary from self-declared secular humanists (and I suspect some posters to this thread), people seem to have an intuitive grasp of Dostoyevsky's dictum "If there is no God, then anything is permitted," regardless of whether they want ordered liberty, and thus hope there is a God, even if they can't believe in Him, or want license, and thus insist there is no God.

[The_Reader_David]

Let's all remember, the internet is a DARPA creation in the first instance--the core protocols of the original internet were those from the old ARPA-net. (They didn't used to have the D for Defense in their acronym.)

[The_Reader_David]

One objection in my list of three (none of which express any objection to the theory of common descent--which I believe with the firmness appropriate to believing well-validated scientific theories, which it is, nor to the notion that allele frequencies vary over time, again well-established) hardly constitutes 'hyperventilating'.

If I am 'hyperventilating', it was the related, but more important objection, listed first, that got too much oxygen in my brain: the misuse of the neo-Darwinian synthesis in support of extra-scientific agendas.

You are quite right, that it matters not a whit to the predictive properties of the neo-Darwinian syntheis whether variation arises by random, pseudo-random, . . . means (though a well-understood non-random source of variation would increase the predictive power).

The problem is, the insistence upon the use of 'random' to describe something, which in its technical definition corresponds to no popular, philosophical, or statistical notion of randomness, does not serve the interest of science, but only supports the interests of those who misconstrue the theory in light of their extra-scientific commitments: creationists and those who abuse science as an apologia for atheism.

Insistence on using 'random' necessarily translates in the popular mind to the proposition that we exist 'by mere chance'. This leads to creationist fervor against evolutionary biology even among those with enough sense to reject application of literalist hermeneutics to Genesis, and plays into the hands of those who want us to have arisen by 'mere chance', particularly atheists of an existentialist inclination.

Since, as you point out, randomness in the usual popular, philosophical or statistical senses is not a necessary ingredient to the theory, the honest defense of science would benefit from dropping the word--which alas will not be done, because too many of the most vocal defenders of the theory have atheistic extra-scientific commitments.

[The_Reader_David]

In his defense, I think RWP is actually an atheist.

His posts evince absolute confidence that only physical reality exists, and that it is completely described by Schroedinger's equation (for a state-vector in a Hilbert space no one can write down--the state space of the entire physical universe).

He, of course, has absolute confidence this exists, when all that we know observationally are the state-spaces for systems in the backward light-cones of (relativistic) classical observers, which form a site in the sense of Grothendieck. But he is certain that all the local Hilbert spaces fit together into a global one, and all the local states fit toether into a global one governed by Schroedinger's equation. (RWP, to which frame of reference is the t that in the partial derivative attached?).

[Right Wing Professor]

(RWP, to which frame of reference is the t that in the partial derivative attached?).

C'mon, guy, relativistic quantum mechanics takes care of that.

I'm surprise you didn't bring up the incongruity between GR and QM at scales of the order of the Planck length. Clearly, this is not yet a complete theory. Nonetheless, the point remains, it is deterministic, as written; and if you want to allow some supernatural being to tinker with the evolution of the universe, either you have to give that being the ability to suspend the operation of physical laws, or you have to interpose some entirely unexpected non-determinism in them.

BTW, I don't have absolute confidence in anything. It's hostile to assign attitudes to people for the purposes of ad hominem argument.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

You have an interesting home page.

I hope you can stick around and contribute your input on the crevo threads. You're coming from an interesting point of view with an actual theological education as opposed to some of our posters, as well as an education in mathematics.

There are quite a few of us Christians here as well as a collection of agnostics and some atheists. It's great to have someone who can weigh in with some background and insight.

PH - Who's ping list can we get David on?

[The_Reader_David]

But what ping list would I fit on? There isn't one for folks who believe in common descent; have doubts about the neo-Darwinian synthesis for reasons grounded in philosophy of science, rather than in theology, and only strongly object to its misapplication outside of science; object to ID claiming to be scientific because it relies on a priori probability estimates; and regard literalist Biblical heremeneutics as a shallow exercise undertaken by folks standing outside Holy Tradition.

I'm mostly a critic of the whole debate.

Trust me, when I have an inclination to contribute to these threads I join them.

[The_Reader_David]

Actually, the post you are replying to sketched Isham's approach to using topos theory to resolve the incongruity between GR and QM, which really does call into question the existence of a global wave-function for the universe, since not all sheaves have global sections.

Personally, I see design not in tinkering, but residing, way down deep, under the entire structure. GR and QM are each far too elegant to not be the product of Mind. The problem for folks who want a theory of intelligent design is precisedly that if they went to escape from the bogus use of a priori probability estimates, they need to get over the 'tinkering' mentality, and start thinking in terms of anthropic cosmology, and how one could detect in a convincing way a 'signature of intelligence' there, rather like detecting the signature of the Big Bang in the background radiation. (Though, I admit to being charmed by the possibility that intelligence so relies on self-reference that the resolution of whether an intelligent actor is involved in something is algorithmically undecidable.)

And you are a little testy: your posts indeed evinced confidence which you now deny. You are welcomed to backtrack on your use of a global wave-function for the universe in your argumentation, but merely claiming the title 'atheist' , rather than 'agnostic,' evinces confidence. It is hardly hostility to attribute to you confidence in what you, yourself, present forcefully.

Of course, perhaps your atheism is really just a sensible disbelief in what I like to call 'one god paganism'. Sure, there are a lot of folks out there whose monotheism is a belief in a single, super-powerful (often irrationally vengeful) old man in the sky. But that was never the point of monotheism--our rejection of paganism rests on the conviction that the ground-of-all-being, the answer to Hawking's question, 'What is it that breaths fire into the equations and makes there be something for them to describe?', while transcendent, is more like a person than a thing or abstract idea, and has self-revealed to human beings, and that even were there such beings as the pagans call gods, they would be quite irrelevant to how we ought live.

[<1/1,000,000th%]

There isn't one for folks who believe in common descent; have doubts about the neo-Darwinian synthesis for reasons grounded in philosophy of science, rather than in theology, and only strongly object to its misapplication outside of science; object to ID claiming to be scientific because it relies on a priori probability estimates; and regard literalist Biblical heremeneutics as a shallow exercise undertaken by folks standing outside Holy Tradition.

Oh sure. Start nit-picking right off the bat. ;)

But seriously there really isn't any consensus on how people approach this debate. As much as folks supporting modern evolutionary biology are all over the map, the anti-evolution crowd are even more diverse.

I think you fit in just fine.

[Right Wing Professor]

Personally, I see design not in tinkering, but residing, way down deep, under the entire structure. GR and QM are each far too elegant to not be the product of Mind. The problem for folks who want a theory of intelligent design is precisedly that if they went to escape from the bogus use of a priori probability estimates, they need to get over the 'tinkering' mentality, and start thinking in terms of anthropic cosmology, and how one could detect in a convincing way a 'signature of intelligence' there, rather like detecting the signature of the Big Bang in the background radiation.

I have no objection to the idea that the structure of the universe derives from some massive intelligence; I am skeptical about the likelihood that it can be detected; and certainly about efforts to date. Dembski, for example, seems to have moved hardly at all from 'bogus use of a priori probability estimates'. And I do agree that 'God the Tinkerer' would be a disappointing deity.

It is hardly hostility to attribute to you confidence in what you, yourself, present forcefully.

Of course not. It is hostile to attribute absolutism. I am an atheist not out of absolutism, but because of all the possible ways the universe might have come about, a single individual deity created in man's image seems to be one of the least plausible, and I refuse to label myself in terms of an uncertainty about whether this creature, of all the possible cosmologies, exists. As you say, disbelief in 'one god paganism' is sensible.

[PatrickHenry]

Placemarker.