Posted on 02/14/2007 12:43:16 PM PST by steve-b
The second most powerful member of the Texas House has circulated a Georgia lawmaker's call for a broad assault on teaching of evolution.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Warren Chisum, R-Pampa, used House operations Tuesday to deliver a memo from Georgia state Rep. Ben Bridges.
The memo assails what it calls "the evolution monopoly in the schools."
Mr. Bridges' memo claims that teaching evolution amounts to indoctrinating students in an ancient Jewish sect's beliefs.
"Indisputable evidence – long hidden but now available to everyone – demonstrates conclusively that so-called 'secular evolution science' is the Big Bang, 15-billion-year, alternate 'creation scenario' of the Pharisee Religion," writes Mr. Bridges, a Republican from Cleveland, Ga. He has argued against teaching of evolution in Georgia schools for several years....
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...
"Rotating frames of reference are not inertial. Therefore, you're incorrect. If the Earth didn't rotate, the coriolis effect wouldn't occur, for starters."
It could still occur if the coriolis effect is in fact caused by an entity different from the entity to which we ascribe its causation.
I don't think the two are mutually exclusive. To be more specific, the kind of religious zealots who are so wedded to their specific dogma that they fear even hearing an alternative view would taint them and weaken their faith.
"a universe in which the Earth is fixed, and all the laws of physics are changed to make that universe indistinguishable from our own," would be indistinguishable from our own"
Not quite what I was saying, really.
Remember, the "laws" of physics are not laws. They are human models, and they fray at the edges (faster-than-light universal expansion, for example). There is a uniformitarian assumption built into the models of physics which isn't verifiable, and which could be wrong.
If you assume that the physics models are laws, observed and concrete and Right (capital R), then sure, you'd have to really change the "laws" of physics to make an earth-centered universe look exactly as the one we have now.
But you can't really go that far. Because the "laws" of physics aren't laws at all, they're models, and it could be that they're wrong. It could be that the earth is, in fact, the center of the real universe, and that our laws of physics are wrong, and do not in fact represent reality, that the REAL laws of physics - which we don't understand, and which are quite contrary to our erroneous models - cause the universe to behave exactly as we see it behave, given that our earth is at the very center of everything and does not move.
You could model the universe that way. "Problems", such as the retrograde motion of the planets, could be expressed mathematically. What would be absent would bt eh neat and simple explanation of our current model, that the suns' gravity causes the planets to revolve elliptically around it. Instead, we would observe (as we DO observe, if we choose to do so) that the planets sun and universe revolve around the earth, but that the planets do not do so in elliptical orbits. Obviously, then the gravity model would be wrong and some other entity or juxtaposition of entities would be causing the planets to do that.
It would certainly be a messy way to model the universe, messier than the current model which has gravity as an explanation for the behavior. But it COULD be in the real, actual, universe as it really is, that gravity ISN'T the explanation, and that everything really DOES revolve around a fixed earth, exactly as we see it. This does not mean postulating a new universe. It's THIS universe. It means junking the "laws" of physics and starting over. What we'd end up with would be a proliferation of entities and of mysteries, as compared to what we think we know now. That doesn't mean it would be WRONG. It does mean that it's not very likely at all.
Indisputable evidence – long hidden but now available to everyone – demonstrates conclusively that Mr. Bridges is an idiot.
Well stated.
Such as?
BTW, and you know this how?
You might run into a bit of bother modelling the phases of Venus.
ROTFLMAO!
Try the entire scientific community, 4000 years of research, countless folks thru the ages, and so much evidence it take libraries to hold it all (with more coming in every single day).
Time to wake up and get out of kindergarten Dave.
Attempt to add "The Lyman Alpha Forest, CMB, and GR to you model. Just ain't gonna happen. Geocentrism is dead. (except for certain models that make stellar navigation easier to compute, however, those are very specific and cannot be used in the general sense)
Oh, QED for example.
"You might run into a bit of bother modelling the phases of Venus."
No trouble whatever. You just keep adding entities to explain it. Of course, then you end up with lots and lots of entities, each postulated to drive some particular thing. This proliferation of entities starts to be quite a Rube Goldberg, and is not as convenient, comfortable, or desireable (in an intellectual sense) than the very simply mechanics of Kepler with its Newtonian gravitational driver.
Still, Occam's Razor is a rule of thought, not a law of nature. It may very well be that there are 37,156 independent fundamental forces, not 4. Of course, with that sort of proliferation of entities, everything becomes quasi-impossible to visualize. Occam's Razor is useful indeed, but it doesn't perforce mean that the simplest explanation which fits the facts is REALLY what is happening. There MAY BE an entity or 9 that drives the phases of Venus, and that the Keplerian, et al, modelling merely happens to work by coincidence or by a least common multiples effect.
Do I really think this is how the world works? No. But I think it is important to remember that our standard model, though GOOD, is frayed at the edges and only models reality, it ISN'T reality. It is clear that, to the extent expansion occurred at all, it occurred at multiples of the speed of light...that is ASSUMING that the constants we use really ARE constant. The entirety of our science is based on the uniformitarian assumption. We ASSUME that what we see now, the rates and the constants, were always the SAME across time. We don't have any way to measure that, because we cannot observe the past at all. Even when we say that the light we see was emitted "billions of light years ago", that too is based on the uniformitarian assumption: starlight does not come with a date-stamp. We ASSUME that light travelled in past eras at the same velocity it does today. Just as we ASSUME that, say, Carbon 14 broke down in earlier epochs at the same rate that it does today. Thus we can measure the distances of the cosmos and the age of very old things. But if the constant speed of light has abruptly changed...or BEEN changed...or the rate of radioactive decay has not been smoothly constant, but has been punctuated by sudden changes of constants, our ability to REALLY look back into time is brutally foreshortened.
The Standard Model is the best that fits the facts as far as we know them, but it is based on assumptions. We cannot fall into the mistake of becoming pietist about natural science and treating it as divine revelation from great minds. It IS, in a real sense, the revelation of great minds, but those minds are fallible, and could only reason based on the facts they had and whatever intuitive insights that come from those mysterious idiosyncratic recesses of the mind.
It will not do for natural scientists to be as sneeringly condescending as religious revelationists. We cannot pretend that scientific knowledge is revelation. It isn't, of course. Revelation is either absolutely right, or absolute bunk or, I suppose, it could be absolute deception, if really revealed, but by a malevolent intelligence and not a benevolent one (how would WE know? We can't see spirits...at least not if they don't reveal themselves, and that phenomenon, to the extent it is real in a nat.sci sense at all, is not currently testable because no such spirit thus far has been willing to reliably reveal itself to any seeker, including the scientific tester). We can't use revelation as more than a starting point for observation. Joshua fought a battle of Jehrico and the walls came a-tumblin' down? Well, we can go dig at Jehrico and see if there's any evidence. The God created the world in a bubble of air amidst an endless abyss of water? Well, we can look out there and try to find the water. Etc. The Jehrico research is a lot easier to do than the things far outside the reach of human history.
All of that is obvious. I could just short-circuit everything and say: Science is not religion. The simplest explanation that fits the facts is probably the best model, given the limitations of our mind, but it might not actually literally reveal true reality. The universe may be able to be expressed accurately with four forces out to a certain number of significant figures, but after that, it may be a hell of a lot more complicated, and the "four" forces may devolve into an hundred thousand.
I haven't seen anyone attempt to explain the phases of Venus in a geocentric universe. I'm not saying it can't be done, but I'd be amused by the effort.
"Other scientific theories are far better established."
Not my quote, not my post. :)
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