Posted on 03/13/2002 4:47:26 AM PST by JediGirl
What an absolutely GREAT quote!
Here's another:
Butterflies … not quite birds, as they were not quite flowers, mysterious and fascinating as are all indeterminate creatures.
Elizabeth Goudge The Child from the Sea
And another:
when god decided to invent
everything he took one
breath bigger than a circustent
and everything began
e. e. cummings when god decided to invent.
Liberal/libberatarians like the cheese--evolution... lurk here!
Yep.
Remember that if your opponent has no direct knowledge of the science involved, and is merely claiming truth because "I read it somewhere", this constitutes a fallacious appeal to authority. Point this out to him. One should always be able to explain the logic and science behind one's argument rather than simply making vague reference to an anonymous source.Speaking of "appeal to authority," JediGirl, can you explain the logic behind using an exponential decay function in radiometric dating? Can you derive this yourself? Can you list the assumptions necessary to derive it? Or would you never appeal to radiometric dating methods? Or will you never again post "Common Creationist Arguments - Pseudoscience"? You don't want to be like Medved, do you?
Or how about this?
Isaac Newton restated it thusly: "We are to admit no more causes of natural things than such as are both true and sufficient to explain their appearances."This would seem to be a poor support for modern science, since, according to (if I recall correctly) the American Academy of Sciences, science is the search for, not the true explanations, but naturalistic explanations of phenomena. If there are actually any non-naturalistic causes for any phenomena studied by modern science, then modern science will be in direct conflict with Newton's restatement of Occam's Razor.
Not that that bothers me. It's the hyporcrisy that bothers me.
"Occam's Razor ne'er shaved the barber; it is too dull."
--Glory Road by Robert Heinlein. Quoted from a faulty memory.
And just who are you to say it isn't? You must have faith in raspberry flavored jello.
Likewise, you appear to hold some sort of opinion concerning the logic behind using an exponential decay function in radiometric dating. What your opinion is, I have no idea.
If I can't explain it, does that make the process any less credible? Just asking....
Az
That's a start, for sure. There are other markers I can look for - have you published much original work? How often is your work cited by others in your field? Have your contributions been accepted as a matter of consensus? And so forth...
As someone who has gone through the process of getting edumacated myself, I am prepared to preliminarily grant those who have taken the time to undertake a rigorous study of a particular field the status of "expert" in that field. I understand what the process is designed to produce, and I accept it as prima facie valid, until shown otherwise. Whatever I might think of Michael Behe's arguments, I must accept that he meets the standard of being an expert in the field, and therefore his arguments should be considered in that light.
Mankind has built elaborate social institutions to try to ensure that experts are properly certified. In fact, one of them has "certified" me (in math, anyway). The same institutions teach us that it is a logical fallacy to appeal to inappropriate authorities. The subtext tells me that "inappropriate" refers to "uncertified"?by those institutions, at least. How surprising.
Yes and no. I don't think the distinction is quite that clear-cut. Anyone is free to make a contribution, although for non-certified experts, the skeptical bar my be much higher. If, however, your arguments are compelling, the "experts" will have little choice but to accept it.
And I would point out that the bar is set high for a reason. This is, after all, how we weed out the actual frauds, cranks, shysters, and quacks. And really, how can you make a real, original contribution if you haven't A) taken the time to learn the language, and; B) taken the time to learn what others have done before you?
The real problem with the "appeal to authority fallacy" is the question of "appropriate authority." Who decides? Reasonable people will often disagree on who is the "authority" on an issue.
It is certainly an appropriate question to ask whether sciences are too insular and inbred as a result of their acting as their own gatekeepers as to who constitutes an "expert." But, as you said, we have set some societal standards in this area, and I think that the advances and discoveries made by science, particularly in the last 100 years, serve as empirical proof that the system as it currently exists is well worth the inherent resulting trade-offs.
Fair enough. Here you go.
Thanks! And bookmarked.
Recent images from Cydonia and other Martian areas present an insoluble conundrum for NASA and JPL researchers.
What drives the basic instinct of NASA and JPL to deny these stories and try to claim the images are showing natural formations? One possible motive which has been suggested involves the division of funding between manned and unmanned space missions at NASA and JPL.
But, more realistically, the major problem which the Cydonia findings presents to the people in these agencies is one of basic scientific paradigms. Nobody could build all of this stuff on this kind of a megalithic scale with space-suits on; the planet has to be habitable for Cydonia to get built. This is a huge problem, in that it would require a totally different basic theory of the history of our solar system from the one which the scientists have. There is simply no way, given the standard paradigm, in which Mars could have ever been habitable. It would always have been too cold, and it would never have had the gravity necessary to hold a livable atmosphere, assuming that gravity is the only thing which ever holds atmosphere to planets.
The standard scientific axiomatic scheme including the basic doctrine of uniformitarianism, evolution etc. etc. does not allow for solar-system-wide catastrophes within the age of man, nonetheless, that is precisely what we have here. Those newer face images are definitely modern people and not early hominids. Nothing involving modern people here, on Mars, or anywhere else figures to be millions of years gone by, and nothing capable of destroying the planet next to us and making a dead world of it would have gone unnoticed by our ancestors.
What we have here is another case of junk science, i.e. the theory of evolution and the doctrine of uniformity, destroying research and logical thinking amongst scientists. The science pages of our journals are filled by descriptions of NASA projects to search for microbes on Mars while studiously ignoring major evidence that they have found a city there, as if germs were important, and cities were not.
And having just gone to one, it's clear they try to appear "scholarly" by using ridiculous sentence structures as one weapon. My technical report writing professor, bless his heart, gave us two simple rules to spot bad writing. One was long sentences, the other was abundance of prepositional phrases. The site "Natural Selection an Agency of Stasis, not Change" is a perfect example of both, citing a lot of irrelevent garbage to bolster an extremely weak argument.
But it sounds very learned, to some anyway.
If memory serves, Stephen Gould and others like him have made that same basic claim; the idea of selection being an agency of stasis is fairly common and nobody on top of such studies disputes it.
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