Posted on 04/14/2002 12:31:25 AM PDT by sourcery
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You know he didn't know; I know he didn't know. But he didn't know he didn't know.
I know he didn't know. He didn't know how to know. (But you knew that.)
Nice wordy argument about nothing. Farmers knew nothing about celestial mechanics, yet pretty much had planting and harvesting times down fairly pat. This is across isolated and noncommunicating societies worldwide. Science was not involved, good observation was.
In one sense that statement has it 1/2 correct, but it's almost totally wrong in another sense. We knew how to dream of things not real for a long time. But we didn't rise out of the dust until we learned to subject our dreams (by which I assume you & I mean any inspiration, idea, speculation, leap of associative thinking, etc.) to the filter of our shared intersubjective knowledge of how the real world works. (Hey, almost like mutation + natural selection!)
Real progress could never have gotten off the ground until both items were present. Sabertooth's assertion that our individual subjective thoughts - I assume he's referring to a person's introspective belief that God exists - gives the theist a dataset of 1, but tried to suggest that an atheist therefore has 0 pieces of data for nonbelief.
To be useful dreams must be actualized is a given. Progress can be dreamed. Failure can be predicted. Pain can be avoided. You don't have to hit your thumb with a hammer to know that it will hurt. I don't need WWF testimony to verify that a full grown Kodiak will have me for lunch in a mano a mano hoedown.
Preposterous question since a belief by definition is subjective. 250 million is low, but is a "valid" observation. Now, who gets to decide which ones (if any) are correct?
know Pronunciation Key (n
)
v. knew, (n
, ny) known, (nn) know·ing, knows
v. tr.
What we have here,... Is failure to communicate.
In this vein, Evolution can be considered both a science AND a religion.
Well, this is a lie. Do I smell a whiff of desperation? Here's the 1996 Magisterium, and here's a relevant excerpt:
Consequently, theories of evolution which, in accordance with the philosophies inspiring them, consider the mind as emerging from the forces of living matter, or as a mere epiphenomenon of this matter, are incompatible with the truth about man.
But all you really have to know about this hit-piece which, not incidentally, is full of lies and mischaracterizations is:
Jim Holt writes a column about philosophy and science for Slate.com.
What we have here is just another Leftie Atheist book reviewer who has no allegiance whatever to the truth.
It's interesting that the author uses these term. Is there any background on the author?
I think if you look again, you'll see that I was suggesting that an atheist couldn't be sure he had a data set of one, not that he necessarily had a set of zero.
I also don't see that I'm trying to have anything "both ways"--unless you are very doctrinaire. The information-theoretic insights of the ID crowd and the chaotic-dynamics approach of the punctuated equalibrium evolutionists are complementary. I suspect a fruitful interplay would already have begun if evolutionary biologists were not hamstrung by the absolutist materialists in their ranks, for whom (usually gradualist) Darwinism with ontological randomness (rather than epistemological randomness or law-constrained stochastic processes) and a tautological version of natural selection functions as an atheistic creation myth. S. Kauffman of the Santa Fe institute is looking for an extra law of thermodynamics applicable to open systems. Every model of self-organizing complexity anyone comes up with is obviously designed (models always are) and gives the feeling of being very clever and special (e.g. "most" cellular automata are boring).
Before it's all over, I'm quite certain that there will be extra laws of "fitness" discovered, and maybe even extra fundamental laws like the ones Kauffman is trying out (to the discomfort of the evolution-as-argument-from-no-design atheists), and that the stochastic element will remain (to the discomfort of creationists who would like everything to be purposeful).
Personally, I'm happy with the God who not only plays dice, but rolls them where you can't see them, as one (I forget which) quantum physicist commented in contradiction to Einstein's dictum.
Yer gonna get a warning!
Neener, neener, neener!
{Loaked=ON; Status=CLURKING}
Just what FR needs, Henry Fondling (and daughter).
The problem is that one needs a general theory of fitness. (Indeed without it, "natural selection" is tautologous--a thing is fit because more of its offspring survive to reproduce and more of its offspring survive to reproduce because it is fit. One can make up "just-so stories" about both of a pair of seemingly opposed traits to explain how each is more fit.)
I would outline what I expect the characteristics of such a general theory to be:
One problem is that "religion" is really "religions" and "that answer" is "those answers."
I am not really up on Popper, but aren't creationism, ether in the vacuum, Lamarckism, etc, scientific in the Popperian sense?
A Popperian scientific theory is one that is falsifiable, so there are lots of those. Even evolution is falsifiable, if only in the gross sense.
Most theories aren't going to be thrown out even if additional data proves them to be inaccurate, until another theory comes along that is more accurate. Even then, they will still be used in some instances. Most science is about building mental models to explain collected data. As long as you know the limits of the theory you are using, you can go ahead and use Newtonian mechanics, for example.
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n the last decade or so, creationism has grown sophisticated. Oh, the old-fashioned creationists are still around, especially in the Bible Belt. They're the ones who believe that the earth is only a few thousand years old, that God created it and all its inhabitants in six days and that fossils are a product of Noah's flood. In the early 1990's, however, a new breed of creationists appeared. These ''neo-creos,'' as they have been called, are no Dogpatch hayseeds. They have Ph.D.'s and occupy positions at some of the better universities. The case they make against Darwinism does not rest on the authority of Scripture; rather, it proceeds from premises that are scientific and philosophical, invoking esoteric ideas in molecular biology, information theory and the logic of hypothesis testing. 