Darwin vs The Bible

[zigackly]

This one?

 

the Unknowable, the postulated reality lying behind all phenomena but not cognizable by any of the processes by which the mind cognizes phenomenal objects.

 

No, I just mean that science relies on the processes of observation and modelling, both of which have certain limits. It's simply not possible to know everything. And that's before you even embark on questions such as why things are a certain way and not another way.

[zigackly]

Personally I would say that the idea that there are things that we cannot know is something of a faith position, which is why you won't catch me saying things like that.

 

I'd argue that the idea that there are not things we can't know relies rather more on faith, but I can't know exactly what you're thinking, just for one very simple example.

[Strontium]

Sometimes I don't even know what I'm thinking myself.

 

But it's not that kind of "knowledge" I'm really talking about. I would reject the idea that we can say with certainty that there is anything we cannot know about how the universe works and why it exists.

[zigackly]

I would reject the idea that we can say with certainty that there is anything we cannot know about how the universe works and why it exists.

 

What about the limits we know about on the processes of observation and modelling? And science never tells us why, only ever how.

[dennis tooth]

Science is a bag of shite that only observes the observable and make us feel safe like a turkey the night before crimbo. Some liquorice.

[SCOUSE TAPAS]

Science is a bag of shite that only observes the observable and make us feel safe like a turkey the night before crimbo. Some liquorice.

So basically your saying science is a bag of shite that works by getting data/evidance from the materials in front of them.

 

It uses the results of the data gathered from them materials to get exact answers about the past etc.

 

Where as religion is sourced from a ancient book with no actual evidance to what the book claims about this supreme being who nobody has ever seen, and no evidance to suggest he ever existed.

 

So on that therory can I claim batman is real as I read about him in a comic book.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

I take my direction from the only person I truly respect, my Dad. Old school Irish Catholic, who believes that his religion has many moral truths that have value, but absolutely refused to support SPUC because he believed that contraception and choice was fundamental, and was still allowed to attend church despite those beliefs being essentially at odds with Catholic dogma.

 

Ie he was permitted to have a correct opinion and shape his own beliefs within his church.

 

That's why it's a preferable religion. It allows intelligent choice and doesn't expect you to refrain from eating food because some meaningless ancient made up pamphlet which has no relevance in moden society says so

 

Ooh devil shellfish! Evil pigs!

 

Risible

There is nothing in 2,000 year-old Christian tradition about contraception or abortion. Obviously, those are comparatively recent additions to Catholic strictures and are not in any way comparable to the scriptural prohibitions on bacon and prawns and Bob Hoskins.

 

I put it to you, Mr Lining, that you have no significant experience of trying to talk religion with any great numbers of Jews or Muslims and, furthermore, that you are sitting on the keyboard and posting through your hoop. Again.

[Guest Pistonbroke]

We are what we are...some believe in religion and others believe in science. I believe in what i can see.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

We are what we are...some believe in religion and others believe in science. I believe in what i can see.

 

I'm not.

[Guest Pistonbroke]

I'm not.

 

i can see you....

[zigackly]

I believe in what i can see.

 

So you don't believe in molecules or air? Strange fella.

[FanchesterCity]

Evolution is not strictly proven. As such it requires a degree of faith to accept it as the explanation for the emergence of species and their continuing development. Evolution on its own does not, in my opinion, constitute an answer for the origins of life. I think the two need to be separated and treated as different processes which is the approach science is taking.

 

As for the origins of the universe my view is that there was an "event" that took place in an area of undifferentiated "space" that resulted in a boundary being formed. The very act of forming this boundary resulted in the creation of our universe. The differentiation is continuing today as some form of echo or feedback loop to the original event which causes changes to occur faster or slower than at other times. What caused the event is what fascinates me. This event, if it occurred, required some stimulus. What was the stimulus? God? The impact of other events that occurred in the undifferentiated space?

 

Darwen himself made it clear that he merely tried to explain the process of change / evolution, but the origins of life were not explained.

 

The evidence for evolution (to date) is huge, and nobody's managed to disprove it yet...

Although Darwin, and subsequent scientist have explained many aspects of 'HOW' be evolve, there's little explanation for 'WHY'.

 

There is of course, a philosophical view that says "all things will be disproven given enough time", and science is littered with 'absolute truths' that were later shown to be anything but!.

 

Science interprets results in a way we can comprehend. Ergo if we can't comprehend we fail to see a pattern, or result. In that sense, 'science is bunkum' has some merit, but science itself is evolutionary.

 

Truth is immortal - for a limited time ;-)

[FanchesterCity]

We can see air without visual aids.

And we can see molecules with technical aids.

[zigackly]

We can see air without visual aids.

And we can see molecules with technical aids.

 

But no-one has yet been able to detect your sense of humour.

[jonnybastard]

We can see air without visual aids.

And we can see molecules with technical aids.

 

We can see god with mushrooms.

[silverlining]

We are what we are...some believe in religion and others believe in science. I believe in what i can see.

 

You are extraordinarily thick

[jonnybastard]

I've yet to hear a convincing argument for any theory on the creation of the universe. Anyone who mentions a big bang or unknown occurrence is winging it just as much as the god botherers. Perhaps the truth really is beyond our comprehension. Personally, on the whole God/science question- I don't give a fuck, put me an ism label on that if you can.

[AngryOfTuebrook]

We can see air without visual aids.

And we can see molecules with technical aids.

But what can we see with shithouse dog AIDS?

[aws]

Well, that sort of is my point. Caesar has coins with his name and picture on for crying out loud! The evidence that he existed is overwhelming. Whereas on the other hand, the evidence for Jesus is a few contradictory texts written years after his apparent death by people who didn't know him.

 

JC was fo real

 

U tlkin shit LOL

[Bobby Hundreds]

Jesus story is virtually the same as Horus, as mithra as Krishna as Attis. There was no real Jesus or at least the Jesus the bible talks of. I'm an atheist but genuinely I think people can believe whatever the hell they want aslong as its personal to them and doesn't lead to bad things.

 

It's mad though isn't it. Why does life exist, what's the point of atoms coming together and making suns and worlds and people, why. These are the kind of things you think about when your 12 or high.

[zigackly]

Nothing wrong with being high.

[s(k)aturation]

Jesus story is virtually the same as Horus, as mithra as Krishna as Attis. There was no real Jesus or at least the Jesus the bible talks of. I'm an atheist but genuinely I think people can believe whatever the hell they want aslong as its personal to them and doesn't lead to bad things.

 

It's mad though isn't it. Why does life exist, what's the point of atoms coming together and making suns and worlds and people, why. These are the kind of things you think about when your 12 or high.

 

Indeed, BH.

I've been told that the 25th December is the "birthday" of other pagan "deities" pre-dating Christ, and that this date became a Christian one more as a matter of convenience than anything else.

 

And of course, to co-incide with the Boxing Day Sales.

[Sugar Ape]

Four US states considering laws that challenge teaching of evolution | World news | guardian.co.uk

 

 

 

Four US states are considering new legislation about teaching science in schools, allowing pupils to to be taught religious versions of how life on earth developed in what critics say would establish a backdoor way of questioning the theory of evolution.

 

Fresh legislation has been put forward in Colorado, Missouri and Montana. In Oklahoma, there are two bills before the state legislature that include potentially creationist language.

 

A watchdog group, the National Center for Science Education, said that the proposed laws were framed around the concept of "academic freedom". It argues that religious motives are disguised by the language of encouraging more open debate in school classrooms. However, the areas of the curriculum highlighted in the bills tend to focus on the teaching of evolution or other areas of science that clash with traditionally religious interpretations of the world.

 

"Taken at face value, they sound innocuous and lovely: critical thinking, debate and analysis. It seems so innocent, so pure. But they chose to question only areas that religious conservatives are uncomfortable with. There is a religious agenda here," said Josh Rosenau, an NCSE program and policy director.

 

In Oklahoma, one bill has been pre-filed with the state senate and another with the state house. The Senate bill would oblige the state to help teachers "find more effective ways to represent the science curriculum where it addresses scientific controversies". The House bill specifically mentions "biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming and human cloning" as areas that "some teachers are unsure" about teaching.

 

In Montana, a bill put forward by local social conservative state congressman, Clayton Fiscus, also lists things like "random mutation, natural selection, DNA and fossil discoveries" as controversial topics that need more critical teaching. Meanwhile, in Missouri, a bill introduced in mid-January lists "biological and chemical evolution" as topics that teachers should debate over including looking at the "scientific weaknesses" of the long-established theories.

 

Finally, in Colorado, which rarely sees a push towards teaching creationism, a bill has been introduced in the state house of representatives that would require teachers to "respectfully explore scientific questions and learn about scientific evidence related to biological and chemical evolution". Observers say the move is the first piece of creationist-linked legislation to be put forward in the state since 1972.

 

The moves in such a wide range of states have angered advocates of secularism in American official life. "This is just another attempt to bring creationism in through the back door. The only academic freedom they really want to encourage is the freedom to be ignorant," said Rob Boston, senior policy analyst at Americans United for Separation of Church and State.

 

Over the past few years, only Tennessee and Louisiana have managed to pass so-called "academic freedom" laws of the kind currently being considered in the four states. Barbara Forrest, a philosophy professor at Southeastern Louisiana University and close observer of the creationism movement, said that the successes in those two states meant that the religious lobby was always looking for more opportunities.

 

She said that using arguments over academic freedom was a shift in tactic after attempts to specifically get "intelligent design" taught in schools was defeated in a landmark court case in 2005. Intelligent design, which a local school board in Dover, Pennsylvania, had sought to get accepted as legitimate science, asserts that modern life is too complex to have evolved by chance alone. "Creationists never give up. They never do. The language of these bills may be highly sanitized but it is creationist code," she said.

 

The laws can have a direct impact on a state. In Louisiana, 78 Nobel laureate scientists have endorsed the repeal of the creationist education law there. The Society of Integrative and Comparative Biology has even launched a boycott of Louisiana and cancelled a scheduled convention in New Orleans. Louisiana native and prominent anti-creationist campaigner in the state Zack Kopplin said that those pushing such bills in other states were risking similar economic damage to their local economies. "It will hurt economic development," Kopplin said.

 

There is also the impact on students, he added, when they are taught controversies in subjects where the overwhelming majority of scientists have long ago reached consensus agreement. "It really hurts students. It can be embarrassing to be from a state which has become a laughing stock in this area," Kopplin said.

 

Others experts agreed, arguing that it could even hurt future job prospects for students graduating from those states' public high schools. "The jobs of the future are high tech and science-orientated. These lawmakers are making it harder for some of these kids to get those jobs," said Boston.

[The Bugged Out]

To be honest I don't think life, as we try and understand it, has been created at all...

 

What if Reality Was Really Just Sim Universe? | Inside Science

 

"What if everything -- all of us, the world, the universe -- was not real? What if everything we are, know and do was really just someone's computer simulation?

 

The notion that our reality was some kid on a couch in the far future playing with a computer game like a gigantic Sim City, or Civilization, and we are his characters, isn't new. But a group of physicists now thinks they know of a way to test the concept. Three of them propose to test reality by simulating the simulators.

 

Martin Savage, professor of physics at the University of Washington, Zohreh Davoudi, one of his graduate students, and Silas Beane of the University of New Hampshire, would like to see whether they can find traces of simulation in cosmic rays. The work was uploaded in arXiv, an online archive for drafts of academic research papers.

 

The notion that reality is something other than we think it is goes far back in philosophy, including Plato and his Parable of the Cave, which claimed reality was merely shadows of real objects on a cave wall. Sixteenth-century philosopher-mathematician René Descartes thought he proved reality with his famous "I think, therefore, I am," which proposed that he was real and his thoughts had a reality.

 

Then, in 2003, a British philosopher, Nick Bostrom of the University of Oxford, published a paper that had the philosophy and computer science departments buzzing.

 

Bostrom suggested three possibilities: "The chances that a species at our current level of development can avoid going extinct before becoming technologically mature is negligibly small," "almost no technologically mature civilizations are interested in running computer simulations of minds like ours,” or we are "almost certainly" a simulation.

 

All three could be equally possible, he wrote, but if the first two are false, the third must be true. "There will be an astronomically huge number of simulated minds like ours," Bostrom wrote.

 

His suggestion was that our descendants, far in the future, would have the computer capacity to run simulations that complex, and that there might be millions of simulations, and millions of virtual universes with billions of simulated brains in them.

 

Bostrom's paper came out four years after the popular film, "The Matrix," in which humans discover they were simulations run by malevolent machines. The popularity of the film possibly contributed to the attention to Bostrom’s paper received at the time, but nothing came of it.

 

"He put it together in clear terms and came out with probabilities of what is likely and what is not," Savage said. "He crystallized it, at least in my mind."

 

In the movie and in Savage's proposal, the discovery that reality was virtual came when unexpected errors showed up in life, demonstrating imperfections in the simulation.

 

Savage and his colleagues assume that any future simulators would use some of the same techniques current scientists use to run simulations, with the same constraints. The future simulators, Savage indicated, would map their universe on a mathematical lattice or grid, consisting of points and lines. This would not be an everyday grid but a "hypercube" consisting of four dimensions, three for space, and one to represent points in time.

 

A present-day example is lattice quantum chromodynamics, which explores the effects of the strong nuclear force, one of the four fundamental forces in the universe, on tiny elementary particles such as quarks and gluons. In this approach, the particles jump from point to point on a grid, without passing through the space between them. The simulations cause time to pass in a similar way, like the frames of film passing through a movie camera, so that the time that passed between frames is not part of the simulation. This style of simulation requires less computer power than treating space and time as a continuum.

 

Because Savage and his colleague assume that future simulators will use a similar approach, he suggests looking at the behavior of very high-energy cosmic ray particles to see whether there is a grid in the energy as a start.

 

"You look at the very highest energy cosmic rays and look for distributions that have symmetry problems, which are not isotropic," or the same in every direction, he said.

 

"Everything looks like it is on a continuum,” Savage said. "There is no evidence to show that is not the case at the moment."

 

"We are looking for something to indicate you don't have a space-time continuum."

 

That disturbance in the force might be a hint that something in reality is amiss. If the cosmic ray energy levels travel along the grid, like following streets in Manhattan or Salt Lake City, it probably is unlikely to be a simulation; if they unexpectedly travel diagonally, reality may be a computer program.

 

Jim Kakalios, a physics professor at the University of Minnesota who was not involved in the paper, said a test such as the one Savage suggests may not prove anything. If they don't find the signatures, it doesn't mean we are not a simulation; our descendants could have used a different grid. If they do find something it also could mean “that's the way space-time is and we never noticed before,” he said.

 

Two other questions arise. One is whether it is conceivable that computers powerful enough to simulate our hugely complex universe ever will exist. If so, it likely will be very far in the future.

 

The second question is linked: Will it ever be possible to simulate human consciousness? After all, we run around thinking and feeling.

 

"Ultimately, the paper glides over the most interesting point: assume we have infinite computing power and we can create this hypercube," Kakalios said. "They assume [the simulators] would know how to simulate human consciousness."

 

We are aware of ourselves, he said, aware of our bodies, aware of what is outside of our bodies, he said. Human consciousness is almost indescribably complex.

 

For generations, science fiction books -- and some science books -- have hypothesized inserting our consciousness into computers so that we essentially live forever. In Caprica, a prequel to the television program Battlestar Galactica, a girl's consciousness is preserved in a computer and it becomes the basis for the evil cyborgs.

 

"We don't understand consciousness,” Kakalios said. "Neuroscience is where physics was before quantum mechanics."

 

"It's a more interesting problem than whether you can simulate protons and quarks."

 

Either way, however, Kakalios said the experiments on cosmic rays are the kind scientists should be doing regardless of the simulation issue."

[AngryOfTuebrook]

Everywhere any of these creationist or ID liars show their stupid faces, this book should be required reading for every student.

 

Why Evolution is True: A book by Jerry Coyne