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To: TheGeezer; LogicWings
We don't seem to have missed your point at all, since in response to "If you want to discard a scientific theory because someone might misapply it, you'd better discard all of science," you merely restated the same logical fallacy. It would appear you have missed our point.

You persist in attempting to smuggle religion into science, or convert -- so to speak -- science into a religion. It isn't.

You have made your position more clear -- thank you -- but you haven't made it any more rational. Your argument appears to be composed of two propositions: 1) The use of materialism in science is a form or religion, and 2) Bad stuff happens when people twist the TOE.

Unfortunately for your position, if science incorporates the supernatural, it ceases to be science. "No one knows how this happened, and no one ever will," is the opposite of science. What would be the point of teaching this at all? "Roses are red because it's God's will that they remind us of the Sacred Blood of Jesus." Prove it wrong. It's fine as, say, moral instruction, at least as far as red roses go, but it isn't scientific. Science is not moral instruction.

The rest of your post about the terrible, awful things that have been justified by the Theory of Evolution even if historically correct, is fallacious nonetheless. The TOE is an attempt to explain in scientific terms what we observe in nature. It's not a recipe book for a better society. Or moral instruction.

Besides, "Bad stuff happens when people twist [insert proposition here]" can be said about anything good or even neutral. Let us stipulate that evil does not need to be twisted in order for bad stuff to happen.

No one, with the possible exception of Richard Dawkins (whom many evolutionists, myself included, dismiss as a loon any time he starts babbling about the meaning, or lack thereof, of life), is suggesting that materialism has become "the only truth." What we say is that it is the only possible basis for the scientific method.

166 posted on 11/09/2005 6:25:39 AM PST by Gumlegs
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To: Gumlegs
Unfortunately for your position, if science incorporates the supernatural, it ceases to be science.

My position is not that science should incorporate the supernatural. My position is that science taught without a reference to other things that are not science, to things that are moral and religious, is an empty system destined to destruction, despair, and emptiness.

"No one knows how this happened, and no one ever will," is the opposite of science. What would be the point of teaching this at all?

The murder rate of young black men in my city is over twenty times that of young white men. Now, a number of things may affect that statistic, but I assert that in decades past lacking this rate of murder amongst the most vulnerable of our subcultures there was also something else lacking, and that was the despair that secular materialism breeds into its adherents. By teaching the opposite of science one harvests what is the opposite of science divorce from the rest of reality, which is despair. Science in not salvation, if it is alone in the context of life. Art is not science. History, or its understanding, is not science. One might say that philosophy is not science in the modern understanding of "science." Yet one is empty without art, history, and philosophy, devoid of "human-ness." Criticism of the flaws of TOE, or merely of the origin of species, is not necessarily detrimental to development; it gives one an understanding of the possibilities of existence, much as criticism of religion derives the same experience.

The rest of your post about the terrible, awful things that have been justified by the Theory of Evolution even if historically correct, is fallacious nonetheless. The TOE is an attempt to explain in scientific terms what we observe in nature. It's not a recipe book for a better society. Or moral instruction.

Though awful things have been justified by TOE and are historically true, I am inaccurate in assessing TOE effects upon the human condition. I think that is basically your assertion, sounding much like Dan Rather's assertion regarding the National Guard Memos: "They are fake, but they are nevertheless accurate." I agree that TOE is NOT a recipe for a better society; why do so many TOE adherents fight resolutely to suppress what may be a recipe for a better society? Teaching alternative explanations for the existence of life may be an improvement upon a singular explanation with serious flaws.

What we say is that it (materialism) is the only possible basis for the scientific method.

I agree, but if implication carries this principle beyond its competence, it is only fair to warn the naive of that fact.

167 posted on 11/09/2005 5:59:04 PM PST by TheGeezer
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