Basic Evolutionist Time Sandwich

7/23/06 | self

[thomaswest]

Re 208: It seems to be true that humans mentally prefer predictability and certainty,.. Except for casino owners. Of course, randomness has its own laws; and if molecules exist, randomly generated events are just a predictable as deterministic.

Casino owners absolutely love statistical predictability. They predict that for every one who goes home richer, two will go home poorer. For every dollar bet, they will get on average 1/5th of it. Their prediction makes them very rich.

The foolish ones are those who pray, listen to psychics, have lucky charms, etc., who think they will beat predictability.

[Deadshot Drifter]

I probably should have noted that the powerpoint presentation which the link involving the Haldane Dilemma points to was for a little presentation I gave at the McLean Bible Church in Virginia on the topic about a couple of months ago.

Naw, what you should have noted is the true size of the flakes you keep hilariously referring to as meat. The pics you keep posting are blown up images taken from under an electron microscope.
*the link is over a year old but describes what the flakes actually are. medularry bone tissue. 5th paragraph describes the demineralization process used
1) it is not meat
2) they are so small that not even a biting fly could make a snack out of it

Maybe you can help Behe write a sequel to "Darwin's Black Box".
Call it Pandora's Box: The Startling Secret Origins of Man Made Flies, Mosquitos and Ticks

[thomaswest]

There is no Jewish science, no Christian science, no Islamic science, no Hindu science. Jewish Physics; Christian Science; Islamic Science;Hindu Science

Cute. Makes my point. The "Christian science" of the Christian Scientist Church is, of course, nothing like what IDists are arguing for. "Jewish science" was an epitaph used by Hitler. Islamic science is on creationism and ID exactly the same as fundamentalist Christians. Any Baptist sermon attacking evolution could move into a fundamentalist Mosque without changing a word.

[GoLightly]

But, I had the audacity to ask "who was being prayed to ?"

Were the prayers all believers or were some of them nonbelievers? How were prayers outside of the study blocked from praying for the control group?

Did the patients know which group they were in? Did they know they were part of a study?

Was additional study blocked by a court? A study of this nature was proposed by someone associated with the University of Minnesota. I heard about the proposed study after a suit was filed by an atheist group to block it. A Madison (Wisconsin) court was going to hear the case. I never found out how the court ruled, but since the hearing took place in an atheist friendly venue & I haven't heard any more about it, I could guess.

[Deadshot Drifter]

I clicked on your links. Words almost fail me. Looks like a site started up by a bunch of whiny bitter creationists that got banned. They seem a bit psychotically obsessed with us.

[Senator Bedfellow]

Looks like a site started up by a bunch of whiny bitter creationists that got banned.

Sometimes looks can be deceiving. This is not one of those cases. :)

[RS]

Found the photos with the scale markings -

tomzz ... you're been using these as some sort of evidence and never ran across these ?



http://filmer.blogspot.com/2005/04/schweitzer-weiner-lowenstam-and-t-rex.html http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/dinosaur/flesh.html

[RS]

Good questions, something a scientific person would ask, but as I said, I never heard of it again -

A court order NOT to pray for someone ? That I'd like to read !

[GoLightly]

The court couldn't block the praying. However, it could block collecting data and publishing results by anyone associated with the state school. Data gathered & results submitted for publication by any religious organization would be naturally suspect.

[RS]

Still would be interesting - a court ordering that certain scientific research cannot be conducted ?

That decision would make mighty good reading ...

It would seem though that the atheists would want to see the testing proceed, and the religious folks would be the ones to block it.

[dread78645]

Who is Ted Holden?

The Ted Page

[dread78645]

One man's mead is another man's poisson.

"Distribute the mead!"

[GoLightly]

Still would be interesting

I agree.

a court ordering that certain scientific research cannot be conducted ?

Bright line between church & state, you know the gig. The court wouldn't be ruling that the study couldn't be done, just that no public funds or facilities could be used to do it.

That decision would make mighty good reading ...

I'd do a search on it for you, but a good portion of my searches tend towards being like stereotypical female shopping expeditions. I may forget what I went to the store to buy. ;o)

It would seem though that the atheists would want to see the testing proceed, and the religious folks would be the ones to block it.

Most of us religious folks would see no reason to block it. As far as I know, there's no way to scientifically quantify the faith of someone else. God answers all prayers, but sometimes His answer is no. Rationalize in, rationalize out, pretty sure you've heard that one. If you think you haven't heard of it, I'll decipher my shorthand.

Meanwhile, someone motivated to join an atheist group, gotta think we're dealing with true believers. Correct public policy would have a higher priority than scientific inquiry.

[GoLightly]

"Distribute the mead!"

Is mead best sipped or chugged?

[RaceBannon]

Creationists Discovered all those sciences, and Creationists brought them all into the modern age.

Evolutionists have taken over and gone almost nowhere we already weren't. The only exception is better machines. No real discoveries.

In fact, the more we know of the chemistry of the cell, the more we see evolution is impossible.

[dread78645]

But, I had the audacity to ask "who was being prayed to ?"

"The patients were broken into three groups. Two were prayed for; the third was not. Half the patients who received the prayers were told that they were being prayed for; half were told that they might or might not receive prayers.

The researchers asked the members of three congregations — St. Paul's Monastery in St. Paul; the Community of Teresian Carmelites in Worcester, Mass.; and Silent Unity, a Missouri prayer ministry near Kansas City — to deliver the prayers, using the patients' first names and the first initials of their last names."

It would seem to be an obvious scientific question about a scientific experiment, but the answer was not forthcoming, nor did I ever here of any followup experiments.

"Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.

And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested."
...

"The problem with studying religion scientifically is that you do violence to the phenomenon by reducing it to basic elements that can be quantified, and that makes for bad science and bad religion," said Dr. Richard Sloan, a professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia and author of a forthcoming book, "Blind Faith: The Unholy Alliance of Religion and Medicine."

-- Long-Awaited Medical Study Questions the Power of Prayer

[tomzz]

Try this.

[freedumb2003]

In fact, the more we know of the chemistry of the cell, the more we see evolution is impossible.

DNA provides further proof of Evolution. Where do you get your science from?

[shrinkermd]

I thought you might be interested in an excerpt from a book on Darwin. Don't worry not by A Christian or any kind of believer insofar as I can tell.

"Surprising as it may seem, there was little sustained opposition to Darwin's book on the grounds that it directly challenged the account of creation in Genesis. Learned biblical study since the Enlightenment had encouraged Christians increasingly to regard the early stories as potent metaphors rather than literal accounts.

"The real challenge of Darwinism for Victorians was that it turned life into an amoral chaos displaying no evidence of a divine authority or any sense of purpose or design.

"One of the most well-known aspects of the Origin of Species controversy is that Darwin kept out of the limelight. He never enjoyed public debate, hated confrontations in which his honour or honesty might be called into question, preferred to stay quietly at home in the background, and was content to let others wave the flag more vigorously than he felt able to do himself. Privately, he believed that disagreements between scientists were generally fruitless. The underlying story is more complex. Darwin kept in close touch. Even though he stayed put at Down House, a barrage of correspondence was despatched and received daily. He used letters to persuade and to influence. He used them to get favourable reviews, correct mistakes, arrange translations and produce revised editions. Without this extraordinary correspondence, rising to a peak of some 500 letters a year after Origin of Species was published, his theory would have sunk. He was helped by the rapid development of the Victorian postal system and the expanding infrastructure of empire..."

url for Janet Browne's book: http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/scienceandnature/story/0,,1826019,00.html

[tomzz]

>DNA provides further proof of Evolution....

Most see DNA/RNA as a total disproof of evolution:

"At that moment, when the DNA/RNA system became understood, the debate between Evolutionists and Creationists should have come to a screeching halt

I.L. Cohen, Researcher and Mathematician
Member NY Academy of Sciences
Officer of the Archaeological Inst. of America
Darwin Was Wrong - A Study in Probabilities
New Research Publications, 1984, p. 4