Posted on 03/25/2002 7:53:24 PM PST by ThinkPlease
Edited on 07/12/2004 3:52:15 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
This makes me suspect that it's a religious idea of the atheists who are desperate to suppress the practice of religion. They are aiming at planting doubts in the minds of children whose religious beliefs are bound to contain origin stories of some sort no matter what religion their families practice. This makes the Darwin SWAG a curriculum item guaranteed to offend everyone but atheists.
Why can't it be dropped and replaced with nothing? The origins of the Earth and the inhabitants of earth have never been proven. Making reference to the musings of scientitsts is well and good as long as their ideas are presented as products of the imaginations of scientists. Since the Darwinists don't want to agree even to that much, the whole bizarre idea should be dropped from public school curricula rather than have it taught as valid theory, which it clearly is not.
What would be your problem with dropping it and replacing it with nothing?
But I gave you one specific example of how it is falsifiable (find widespread mammalian fossils in the Pre Cambrian strata). There are many others. The point is to be a scientific theory, it need only be CAPABLE of being falsified.
I.e., every time it predicts something that doesn't pan out the way it predicted or some discovery makes it much less probable or even mathmatically impossible, the basic premise of evolution is never questioned.
Because whatever errors there were in previous predictions, they were due to misinterpretation of details, not to flaws in the fundamental premises of the theory.
What is atheism? Most people will tell you that it is a belief in nothing, or a belief that there is no supreme being. But this is not true. Atheism is a belief in nature. Atheists believe that nature has created everything, and that nature will repond to natural influences to evolve. When humans die, they become part of nature, according to atheists.
Of course the atheists get all excited when you dispute Darwinism. Its the story of nature. Try disputing the accounts given in the Old Testament with a Baptist; you get the same level of excitement. However, I would judge that there is more faith required for an atheist to believe in Darwinism than what is required for a Christian to have a non-literal belief in the Old Testament.
What I find interesting is that you have mainly stayed clear of a religious discussion of Darwinism on this thread, but the supporters of Darwinism here have made it a religious issue with you.
There is the tie-in to environmentalism. Since atheists believe in nature, then what would be their "church"? The environment, of course. Any defilement of the atheist church is "sacreligious". This is not "sun-worship" in most cases, but it can be. Places like swamps, which previously were considered disease-ridden, are now called "wet-lands" - a place where nature is in its glory. Things that used to be called "jungles" have been elevated to "rain forrest", a place that has highly concentrated amounts of nature. DDT, man and industry are intuders in the atheist "church", and need elimination. At least this is what is taught in public schools.
Don't let anyone tell you that religion is not being taught at school. This country's state-sponsored religion is atheism.
You have a real problem you are going to have to overcome.
What science is, what is included in science, what is excluded from science and what is taught in science classes is defined by scientists. They earn the label "scientist" by doing work that meets the approval of other scientists. In many ways, it is a closed community.
Lawyers, legislators, charlatans, religious fundamentalists and idiots have often tried to break into the community and establish different operating rules but such attempts always will fail. There just is no room in science for nonsense.
Today, the closed community of scientists agrees that evolution is good science. This is just the way it is.
Again, I don't have any problem here which I need to overcome.
If you do not have a problem, what is all the yelling and screaming about?
The closed community of scientists in Germany circa 1938 agreed that eugenics was a good science.
It has taken a while to catch hold in America but its gaining popularity.
No, that is NOT what science is supposed to do.
Scientific theories can NEVER be "proven" in the sense that theorems in Mathematics are proven. That would require making EVERY possible observation and conducting EVERY possible experiment that could dis-prove the theory.
Scientific theories are "accepted" based upon their consonance with the existing body of data, AND their ability to accurately make useful, falsifiable predictions. A theory that is subjected to multiple broad attempts to falsify it, and which explains the phenomenon within it scope better than other theories is thus "accepted" by the consenus among the scientific community.
In short, proof has nothing to do with it. It is based on the preponderance of the evidence, and lack of dis-proof.
You are just doing some wishful thinking.
Not guidance but control. Humans have a faulty control system in that instincts are fuzzy and a great deal of learning is required to permit humans to function in society. Because virtually everything a man requires must be learned the likelihood of error is high. This leads to diversity and divisiveness. Men fight a never ending battle to correct the errors that they believe plague their fellows. Rarely do they seek to correct their own mistakes with equal fervor. This unhappy state of affairs is little different from the sort of conflicts wandering tribes of baboons are wont to engage in.
The point is that intelligence of the human sort is merely a trait. It will eventually be surpassed in every respect by machines of our own making. We are humans which means we have big brains that learn and remember. Men still behave exactly like animals that rely for the most part on instinct.
" Let's also assume that human intelligence is the highest expression of intelligence on this earth based on the human's dominant status." -- xzins
We like to think of ourselves as dominant because of our ability to muck things up for the other life forms. Most often our intelligence is used in a most trivial way as we struggle for survival within a system that is already programmed to ensure our demise. This is not a "higher" intelligence. It is merely the exercise of accumulated knowledge by a system external to ourselves and devoid of intelligence. Governments, for example, are collectives that make slaves of us all and destroy the capacity for intelligence because they wield power beyond the natural abilities of the few men employed to control them. In fact most men in the service of these beasts take all their orders without hesitation or reflection from a book of rules. Many, if not most, of these rules are bad and have only an evil effect but they are enforced nonetheless.
Individual men living in natural settings without an external source of accumulated knowledge would not appear dominant in any sense. If men had to start over completely from scratch (i.e., no language, no tools, no training) they would immediately go extinct. So it is a mistake to confuse the society of men with men as individuals for whom the large brain is utterly useless unless filled with practical knowledge.
"Do I understand you, then, to be saying that such "higher" or greater than "higher" exists elsewhere in the universe as a probability statement?" -- xzins
What I said previously was that life may be rare but intelligence is common where the life we know of is found. Unfortunately, a sample size of one means that numerical probability cannot be calculated for the existence of life elsewhere in the cosmos. On the other hand, for the existence of intelligence where life is found we must currently estimate that probability as equal to one but with zero confidence. We can really only say that life is possible (here it is) and that intelligence is a very common trait of living things on the one planet we have studied so far.
Still haven't read the first chapter yet? Variation, overproduction, and heritability -- What do you do with these facts of life? When you suggest replacing evolution with nothing you must mean that all information about life on this planet would have to be kept from the kids lest one of their number independently rediscovers Darwin's explanation for the geological distribution of fossil species, the geographical distribution of related living species, and the effects of artificial selection on domestic species.
Evolution---Beast Train
Now I've been happy lately, thinking about the bad/dumb things to go
And I believe it is toast/fried, something really bad/lame had to go
Oh I've been smiling lately, dreaming about the Elian/creation-Nation rising
And I believed it would be, some day it's now...here to stay
Cause going out over the edge of darkness, there crashes the BEAST train
Oh BEAST train leaving this country, taking the big crash/trash run
Now I've been smiling lately, thinking about the good things...dubyah already here
And I believed--faith...it--victory would be, something good is here to stay
Oh BEAST train crashing louder
Crash on the BEAST train
Come on crashing BEAST train
Yes, BEAST train morphing-crashing harder
losers/freaks--zombies jump upon the BEAST train
Come losers/mutants all onboard the BEAST train
Get our band--march together, go bring--play our song too
Cause it's getting farther, it soon will be gone for good
Now come and join the singing, it's so far from you
And it's getting farther, soon it will all be gone for good
Now I've been happy lately, thinking about the Elian-creation Nation here
Why we win...go on living, why we live in happiness
Cause out on the edge of darkness, there dies a BEAST train
Oh BEAST train left this country, come Elian--creation Nation rising!
Happy-happy-happy Easter/creation---resurrection...the death of evolution---now!
47 posted on 3/30/02 2:52 AM Hawaii-Aleutian by f.Christian
These are serious questions for the Platonist position.
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