Posted on 11/21/2012 12:48:35 PM PST by unlearner
By now you've heard the outrageous quote from Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., on his doubts about the origins of planet Earth. When asked to give its age, he replied: "I'm not a scientist, man. … Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries."
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I've no doubt that these critiques of Rubio are sound. But I'm hesitant to let the crown prince of the Tea Party be singled out for blame. His shameless dodge and pander on the matter of the Earth's creation don't mark him as a radical, nor even as a soldier in the war on science. They mark him only as a mainstream politician.
Beware, for thou that judgest doest the same things: Members of both parties have had to squiggle through elections by appealing to a hazy sense of geo-history. In fact, the Antichrist himself—Barack Obama—has had a tendency to get a little soft with science. Let's compare Rubio's offending quote to one that came out of Obama's mouth four years ago, when he first campaigned for president.
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.com ...
I think Rubio gave a spot-on answer to a stupid, “Gotcha” question, yet the lefty media still smears him despite the fact they haven’t asked Obama a question of any substance in over 5+ years.
FTMSM
The media will “Palinize” Rubio no matter what he says and they will twist and distort his answers and statements and they have 4 years to do so.
When Palin gave her acceptance speech, I stated on this forum that the media would skewer her, which they did.
They will do the same to any GOP candidate that has a chance of winning and will pick our candidate for us - Bob Dole, John McCain, Mitt Romney.
I would’ve paid to see Newt Gingrich debate the Empty Suit, but the media would never allow it, knowing that Gingrich would utterly embarrass Zero and thus win the election.
Instead, they picked a RINO that didn’t excite true conservatives the way Sarah Palin did, which is why the media spent so much time and energy smearing her and her family.
Notice how they stopped once she stated she would not run in 2012?
“- thus evolution is a fact.”
Uh. No it’s not. Not if you are talking about Darwin’s theory. Maybe if you are talking about Obama’s position on gay marriage evolving then it is a fact that some activity that can be described as “evolving” does indeed exist.
But if you are talking about a whole systematic organization of biological data into paradigm describing the origin of not only species in general but specifically the human species, then no.
Or if you want to say it is a fact that evolution is a theory then evolution is a fact in the sense that it exists as a theory. But that is just semantics. You could say that about anything. I could say my opinion is that liberals are crazy. Since I know it is truly my opinion, then it is a fact that I think it so. It does not follow that it is a fact that liberals are crazy. It still remains my opinion.
Adaptation is a fact because it has been observed. Adaptation is a lynch pin of evolution. Some would describe it as a step of evolution and therefore we are witnessing evolution. Nope. Circular. That would only be true if evolution as whole were an observable fact. It is not. There is much extrapolation of the data.
And it does not matter if facts are predicted or randomly discovered. Either kind of fact adds credibility to a theory equally. This is because hypothesizing does not cause the prediction to be true or false. Weighting one type of fact over another is purely emotion. Prediction is only meaningful if it is the result of controlled experimentation. That is because it illustrates causality rather than coincidence. It is like if predict the Texans will beat the Packers in the Super Bowl by two points. If that turns out to be true it will be an amazing coincidence. It does not constitute a scientific test for my ability to predict super bowl outcomes. This is true even if the game was rigged and I knew the inside scoop.
The “predictions” of evolution are almost universally of finding facts about things that have already happened. These are not directly observable. They are not in a controlled environment. I have read hundreds of news articles which describe surprised evolutionary scientists because of some startling discovery that did not match their predictions, or at least their expectations. Did they throw out evolutionary theory. No. Why not? You expect successful “predictions” to support the theory. These “tests” are not falsifiable. That’s why. And that’s why they provide little real support to the theory. The theory itself evolves. It adapts to the observable facts. As such, it is hardly worthy of the name “theory”. As a whole, there are no tests which could ever possibly falsify it. If it were up to me I would label it a biological data organization schema, because that is all it really is. It is nothing more than the Dewey decimal system of biology - a paradigm rather than a theory.
I accept adaptation because it is observed. I accept speciation because it is well supported. I reject the popular idea of all life on the planet having a common ancestor. It is pure speculation driven by a need to know, understand and explain what we can observe. But the need to know does not constitute the basis to call your best guess a fact.
Saying evolution is a fact is nonsensical. It is like saying biology is a fact. No, biology is a science, a study of facts and the theories that explain those facts. Except some want to use multiple meanings for the word, but then turn around and claim they are the same thing.
The only way evolution could ever be a fact is if you could accelerate the process to the point of observing speciation of known species into other, drastically different, known species. Or, build a time machine and observe the process. Otherwise, it remains, at best, a theory to explain the facts.
Face it. Evolution is NOT a fact. Saying so just confirms my “law of fact conflation”.
It's just, "Trip Wire Politics". Designed by the LibTard Media.
There is No Real Answer. Just an answer that will divide People.
Evolution is the change in a species, now known to be through change in DNA, over time. That is a fact. What you called adaptation is a consequence of that fact. Speciation, common descent of species, the historical consequences of such are all theoretical consequences of that fact. Natural selection is the theory that explains the fact of what you want to call adaptation, but is more accurately defined in biology as evolution. Evolution is change and it is inevitable. DNA cannot replicate itself with 100% accuracy or keep itself inert.
You call talking about politicians destroying them, and you think that it is still not the proper time to discuss a Senator that has been in office 2 years, that he needs more of some kind of, what, a grace period longer than 2 years?
You may not want to be visiting a political site, if politics is off the table for discussion, in your mind.
You may not want to be visiting a political site, if politics is off the table for discussion, in your mind.
Ohhhh. OK. Thanks your honor.
Rubio was the lesser of evils....him or Charlie Crist! The TEA Party did support him but he is no conservative.
You have to admit that your request was goofy.
Really??? You guys are already drawing the wagons around the rinos before you even find out who they are? When the election is 4 years away?
It was just a polite GFY. Can we stop now, or do you want to continue? Your call. You seem to be following me around trying to provoke something.
That was my memory, that Rubio was our guy when he was running against Crist, but that he wasn’t anywhere close to the “Crown Prince” of the tea party, as the article described him.
He strikes me as more along the lines of a typical mainstream rino, not hard left like Romney though.
[Quote]The age of the earth or the age of the universe? Scientists think the universe is 14.5 billion years old. How they can measure that is a mystery, since the “year” is how long it takes the earth to go around the sun, and there was no sun and no earth at the beginning of the universe.”
You are mistaken in a number of ways. First, there are a number of different ways of defining a year besides defining a year as “how long it takes the earth to go around the sun,” which is of course changing slightly all of the time and year to year. See for example the definitions for a sidereal year and other types of year measurements.
Secondly, Time and the Universe did not and are not going to cease to exist because there was no Earth around by which its orbit about a star could be used by humans to reckon divisions of time.
Thirdly, how we can measure time and reckon the age of the Universe is no great mystery once we developed the instrumentation needed to observe the Universe backwards in time to its earliest beginnings.Due to the properties of light and matter the observations of the Universe are literally a window backwards in time to the birth of the Universe.
Hey goof ball, no one is following you, you posted to ME, and came way behind me on the thread, look at post 3.
I don’t know who you are but you need to get your head on right.
That isn’t getting “your head on right”, it is sounding even more paranoid and insane.
No one is after you, nothing is going on, nothing is happening that is threatening or dangerous to you, you are on a political forum discussing politics, take a deep breath and calm down.
No. I always prefer the most conservative candidate. Whatever options are available to me, I vote conservative. When you have a moderate versus a liberal I generally support the moderate. I do understand those who choose to abstain when the difference is minimal. In this presidential race I saw Romney as a moderate to left-leaning Republican. I hoped he would defeat our far-left president and maybe move to the right. I’m not talking about elections four years out, or even two years.
“Evolution is the change in a species, now known to be through change in DNA, over time.”
When people argue evolution to be a fact, they are trying to argue that speciation, common ancestry, and billions of years of biological history are also facts. While adaptation is an observable fact, it is a non sequitur to say ALL of evolutionary theory is a fact because evolutionary theory encompasses more than adaptation, much more. The term evolution has many meanings as I pointed out earlier, but in the context of evolution vs. creation debate, it is a theory or group of theories. To call it a fact is semantics designed to distract from the weakness of a failed logical argument.
Evolution is the multi-level marketing of science - a biological ponzi scheme. If we could set aside what Pasteur showed regarding spotaneous generation and assume that simple life forms in an earth-like environment would often, easily, and automatically form from simple non-living ingredients abundantly available here; or if we assumed they have routinely been spewed toward Earth from outer space frequently enough to overcome the likelihood of repeated extinction-level events that would certainly occur in millions of years, let alone billions; and if we assumed the variation of genetic information that occurs during reproduction is sufficient to cause a constant flux of change; we still could not use such a theory to explain the unchanged nature of certain life forms over millions of years in a constantly changing environment nor the tendency for life on earth to generally become more complex and sophisticated over time. Why has life “evolved” to greater complexity and sophistication while at any moment over billions of years all of the progress could be laid waste by similar simple variations in microscopic organisms capable of wiping out all of this complexity?
Evolution is a tautology, hardly worthy of being called a theory. Evolutionists argue against this, or rather mock this statement, based on the idea of being the fittest means more than just survival. The problem is the fittest are also coincidentally over billions of years progressively more complex and sophisticated. We don’t find more sophisticated and complex creatures than man say 50 million years ago which became extinct and replaced by more fit but less complex and less sophisticated life forms. No, things are always getting better, just like in a liberal utopia. Evolution proponents claim the theory explains the origins of the species, i.e. biological complexity and sophistication, but it does not ever explain why adaptation, mutation, survival, or even speciation should lead to more complex and sophisticated life forms as a universal generalization. Nor can it explain why life in general has tended to survive rather than become extinct. There is no general law about any one single aspect of evolutionary theory that explains this tendency. Thus, it is a tautology.
To accept that mere forces of nature operating randomly has resulted in the complexity and diversity of life we see today is to accept as an article of faith something so drastically against all of the odds stacked against it as to be complete absurdity as opposed to the rational faith evolutionists are so prone to mock.
If one defines gravity as the theory that the universe self assembled over billions of years without God’s input then many will deny that gravity is a fact. Doesn’t change that gravity is a fact.
Evolution, as defined by biology, is a fact. The theory that explains this fact is natural selection of genetic variation.
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