Posted on 03/24/2002 7:03:09 PM PST by scripter
I appeciate your honest response. I agree that science education in high school is pathetic generally. I think my cat could do a better job. She trained me to let her out all hours of the day and night, and wait for her to come in.
I think the confusion in biology begins with the incredible amount of information available. The number of observations is in the trillions even discounting all the material gathering dust in boxes in different institutions' basements. And it stretches from animal behavior in the wild to molecular biochemistry. My dad's been taking a new synthetic catecholamine for his heart. I've been tracking down some of the details of its interaction and I've got thousands of pages of material to go through.
Just this next month alone, we have lecturers coming from Johns Hopkins U and Humbodlt U in Berlin, to talk about chromosomal translocations and methylation of genes. These are the only two I can remember. The schedule is several pages long. Each entry gets a one line description.
There's a lot of money to be made by someone who can figure out how to make all this information easily available.
Happy Easter!
Then you should get interested in Astronomy and Cosmology. The field is going wild with all the new observations.
Since one can't be off-thread on a crevo thread...
Actually it was for saying that the earth spun, which caused the tides. Galileo didn't believe the moon caused the tides because that would be astrology and therefore, a superstition. Mostly the other guys were jealous because a couple of the popes were Galileo's students and Galileo drew pensions from two Italian kingdoms.
There's a book published in the last couple years in English of Galileo's daughter's letters to him from the monastary. Its tedious to read, but full of gems. Galileo's letters to his daughter were destroyed by the Reverend Mother (his daughter?) to prevent them falling into the hands of his accusers.
Someone's been watching me balance my checkbook again.
That's part of the statement as well.
I probably should have left out the word "arguments," but I am not "forgetting" this. This is part of my point. Observations test theories because they either confirm or contradict deductions from the theory. IOW a theory (or rather the proposition "this theory is true") implies that certain facts should or should not be observed.
If theories are entailed by a set of facts, then testing them by means of facts would be pointless. The only sense in which facts might be said to entail theories at all is in the weak sense of mere compatibility, but this is useless as there will always be an infinite number of theories that are logically consistent with any given collection of facts or observations.
Of course it is certainly necessary that a good theory be consistent with known facts, but that is a minimal requirement. It is additionally necessary that additional facts beyond those currently known are deducible from the theory.
You are confused about a very simple point. That 'no arguments or observations can logically entail P' is somehow consistent with 'an argument invoking Q logically entails P'.'
I don't understand what you are trying to say here at all.
Alright, squeeze your eye tightly shut, put your hands over your ears, and click here.
O.K., now go back to pretending like this never happened.
"... there are many reasons why you might not understand [an explanation of a scientific theory] ... Finally, there is this possibility: after I tell you something, you just can't believe it. You can't accept it. You don't like it. A little screen comes down and you don't listen anymore. I'm going to describe to you how Nature is - and if you don't like it, that's going to get in the way of your understanding it. It's a problem that [scientists] have learned to deal with: They've learned to realize that whether they like a theory or they don't like a theory is not the essential question. Rather, it is whether or not the theory gives predictions that agree with experiment. It is not a question of whether a theory is philosophically delightful, or easy to understand, or perfectly reasonable from the point of view of common sense. [A scientific theory] describes Nature as absurd from the point of view of common sense. And it agrees fully with experiment. So I hope you can accept Nature as She is - absurd. I'm going to have fun telling you about this absurdity, because I find it delightful. Please don't turn yourself off because you can't believe Nature is so strange. Just hear me all out, and I hope you'll be as delighted as I am when we're through. "
- Richard P. Feynman (1918-1988), from the introductory lecture on quantum mechanics reproduced in QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter (Feynman 1985).
Wrong. A theory that does not say how something happened is not a theory at all. As I say, the evolutionists keep saying that the theory of evolution is true, yet they cannot even say exactly what the theory is. A theory cannot be proven if there is no theory!
No it is not a perversion of evolution, it is the heart of evolution. Darwin himself advocated eugenics in his Descent of Man, as I already showed on this thread.
guilty conscious.....(sic)
Fletch- - - that sounds like a phrase YOU would craft in your own demented and inimitable phrase-crafting genius...(I think the poster MEANT guilty CONSCIENCE but actually created an entirely unique sort of malaprop, Norm-Crosby-ism!)
I never said such a thing or even implied it - that's why you could not quote me on anything in your response. I also realize that you wish to divert the discussion away from evolution and talk about religion. Sorry, I will not play that game.
That junk DNA is not junk is not speculation at all. This has been proven. The speculation came from the evolutionists who were looking for a way to make their theory believable. Here's proof that although we may not know what it does, fooling around with "junk DNA" is as dangerous to the organism as fooling around with genetic DNA:
Sidransky and his colleagues set out to develop a better technique based on changes in junk DNA--genetic material that doesn't appear to encode proteins. The team found that repeating sequences of bases, called microsatellites, mutate when the bladder cells become cancerous, omitting or adding sequences. Comparing junk DNA in bladder cells and normal cells of 21 patients who had been treated for bladder cancer, the researchers were able to diagnose a recurrence of the tumor in 10 of 11 patients--as well as to issue a clean bill of health to 10 patients.
From: Junk DNA Tips off Tumor Comeback
So, you admit that God was high when he created the Duck Billed Platypus.
Stop misrepresenting my statements. I quite convincingly showed in my previous response to you that rock and rollers high on drugs are not a good source for scientific information. It seems like your only answer to questions about evolution is to bash religion. Very, very lame.
Christians are not limiting what God can do, we are just taking Him at his Word - the Bible.
If you cannot bother to post the proof of evolution, I cannot bother to read it. If you cannot find it, I will not look for it for you. The utter arrogance of evolutionists to tell their opponents to prove their theories for them is unbelievable. It is also unbelievably lame.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.