I believe in the "Ucblockhead is God" theory. I am God, and created the universe in order to entertain myself. I then temporarily made myself ignorant so that I wouldn't be all omnipotent and stuff, and thereby bored. You all are just my creations. As soon as you cease to amuse me, I will vanish the universe and start over.
This is one of the problems that is being exploited by the creationists - the scientific usage of the word 'theory' and the everyday use are substantially different.
I don't believe that the school classroom is the appropriate place for the scientific community to further it's anti-faith agenda. There are people in the country and in the world that do believe in a divine force behind the creation of life, and they should be able to send their children to school with confidence that facts are treated as facts and theories are treated as theories. Evolution is not proven. Doesn't it seem ridiculous to outlaw the presentation of alternate explanations?
Nobody's trying to outlaw religious explanations. It's the religious people who are trying to discredit scientific explanations, though.
Also, evolution isn't proven but there's a hell of a lot of evidence for it. Not to mention that it works really well in many contexts (for example, in the world of genetic algorithms, where all you specify is the rules of an evolutionary niche and what you get out is a really diverse set of totally off-the-wall random creations which just happen to fill that niche, usually better than what any human can come up with).
What sickens me is that the pro-faith anti-science agenda is so caught up in making sure everyone knows about their fairy stories that they have no tolerance for things which are firmly set in the real world.
Where does faith come from? It's an easy way out from trying to explain that which isn't explained yet. It's a way of saying, "Well, we don't know what happened, so it must have been God's doing." Which is all fine and good, but then when people who are more curious actually set out to figure out the actual mechanisms in place, the faithful get offended that someone else might have an alternate explanation which doesn't involve such an easy crutch.
(Obviously I'm an atheist. Personally I think it's far more beautiful to think that the universe as it is, including all of its great works, came out of a primordial mass of chaos which evolved over trillions of years, than it does to say, "Oh, some guy decided it should be this way.")
I was responding to the link you posted. It seemed enthusiastic about making sure "ID" was completely out of every science curriculum.
Faith is really perpendicular to science. These conflicts come about when scientists start having too much faith in their theories and religious people think their domain is being trampled on. Or when overzealous religious people deem science "too dangerous!"
True faith should encourage science, because it explores the magnificent intricacies of the created universe.
Er, the very definition of faith makes it fundamentally incompatible with science.
well, I don't understand that statement at all, but I am assuming the faith is in a God that is powerful enough to create a universe that abides by complex scientific principles.
and I don't know that I'm suggesting teaching ID either. I mean, there's not much to teach. But if evolution is being taught as an undebatable fact, then there is a problem. *that's* not science.
evolution is a theory based on the evidence, and the best evidence we currently know. when the evidence is disproven or we learn more and it's incompatible with our current theories of evolution then the theory is revised.
intelligent design alleges that God or a god or some gods having created or done things is the best explanation, and in essence alleges we can't know how that came about. so how can you teach something that lies outside of the traditional scientific boundary, with no evidence or testable hypotheses? some people have disbelief regarding evolution. fine. some people don't believe the sky appears blue, or that men have what's called a Y chromosome. science currently disproves both, and science at large has found evolution to be the most tenable of all proposed theories for the reason why we have a diverse amount of species in this world. scientists don't like evolution for its own sake, they believe it because it's a sensible theory that works with the preponderance of evidence. when the evidence is verifiably counter to evolution's theory, then they change the theory where it appears to be false. but i don't know how, or why, you'd teach schoolchildren "some people believe that a god, or an alien, or some aliens, or some gods, or the judeo-moslem-christian god specifically, had his hand in some, or all, or no parts of this process, but they don't have any evidence (except for a lack of theory) and they don't have any theory (except for a lack of evidence). nor do they have any testable hypotheses, because they believe it lies outside of
intelligent design only posits untestable speculation in gaps of current knowledge, and that's, regrettably, unscientific. currently there is no doubt the world is an oblate spheroid, that is, round. if it was not, on clear days i could see mount rainier. imagine if some 11th-century catholics were transported here and found that view mocking and blasphemous. where do we draw the line between respecting legitimate, untestable, no-evidence religious views, and respecting and teaching legitimate, testable, evidentiary scientific ones?
I'm really talking about school curriculums. Obviously evolution is the best scientific explanation, but if a teacher presents evolution as a fact, with no alternate possibilities for the creation of the universe, then that is not fair to anybody. (Even budding atheists might assume there's no value in studying evolution further).
As a parent, I don't want a science teacher to gloss over the inadequacies of evolution in an attempt at convincing my children that there is no God. I want them to be given the facts so they can decide for themselves.
Are you also opposed to teachers teaching Newton's theory of gravity as fact?
As a parent, I've already come to the conclusion that I'll have to be the source of the bulk of my child's science education. Politics has dumbed down public science education to the point of worthlessness.
Frankly, denying evolution is ignorant, as is claiming that evolution is opposed to the belief in God. Even the Catholic church agrees on that!
Science and faith are contradictory because science is specifically about formulating tests to disprove what we think is the case, so that we learn more so that we can formulate new theories which converge on correctness. Science is a very specific system which is based on the assumption that we *can't* ever possibly know anything; there are observed facts (examples: the fossil record shows a slow and gradual change from one species to another, changes in DNA cause changes in development, every animal we've sequenced the DNA from has a lot in common with other animals even if they don't seem to be at all related), there are hypotheses about how those facts came to be, and there are tests which are formulated to disprove those hypotheses. Hypotheses which have stood up to tests are theories.
ID can't be tested, because it can't be disproven and there is no evidence which points to ID which can't be explained by something else as well.
ucblockhead
Are you also opposed to teachers teaching Newton's theory of gravity as fact?
Strictly-speaking, the theory of gravity is not a fact, it is a theory that objects exert a force on all other objects proportional to their mass divided by the square of their distances. It isn't even particularly accurate; it's just an approximation which happens to work at the macro scale for objects which are fairly moderate in size and mass (peanuts to planets), relatively close to each other (millimeters to planetary systems), and not moving at high relative velocities (less than a few megameters per second). That happens to contain a large amount of what we're familiar with, but is a tiny fraction of the grand scheme of things.
Are you also opposed to teachers teaching Newton's theory of gravity as fact?
Given the lack of spiritual significance, I'm not too concerned about how thoroughly it is presented to children. It should not be presented as fact in a college physics class.
Hah. People were executed for claiming the earth went around the sun, because saying so was "against God". The people pushing "Intelligent Design" are just as ignorant as far as understanding what, exactly, is "against God".
So now you say that the sorts of theories that got people executed in the 1600s because the powers that be thought they promoted athiesm have "no spiritial significance".
The theory of gravity is not spiritually significant anymore! Last time I checked we were living in the present. Whether or not somebody was killed centuries ago over an issue vaguely related to your question to me is totally irrelevant. In fact, I'm having trouble finding anything relevant in your reply.
I'm not talking about anything being pro- or anti- God. I'm talking about emphasizing our collective lack of scientific evidence regarding the origin of life.
There is massive evidence for the Theory of Evolution. Massive. There's more evidence for it by far than for Relativity, for instance. Virtually everything discovered in biology for the last 150 years confirms it.
There is no "lack of scientific evidence regarding the origin of life". There are reams and reams of data concerning the origin of life, and all point to the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.
well, that was supposed to be a joke. to ensure that we were working well within the friendly, lively discussion zone.
I have a confession to make. I'm not a biologist. I don't know anything about the proof of anything regarding the origins of life. Perhaps I would make a good ID supporter. What I don't want to be is a biblically spellbound reactionary/zealot. I'm going to go read a book or something.
The only reason I thrusted myself in this discussion was because I do believe in God, and I have been frustrated by the trend of eliminating all things spiritual from schools. I hate the idea of a science class destroying nascent notions of God.
Yes, well, I don't believe in God, and I am damn tired of people with particular religions trying to get at my children through the government.
Freedom of religion means that you can practice whatever religion you want. It does not mean that you get to use the government to force your religion on other people and their children.
And make no mistake...this isn't about religion in general. It's about certain branches of the Christian religion. You don't see kids pledging allegiance under Vishnu, nor do you see people demanding that Buddhist creation myths be taught in school.
It's not about "spiritual" things in the school. It's about one belief system being forced on the children of parents who believe in many belief systems.
If you want spiritual things in schools, fine, but you sure as hell be planning on spending as much time on Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, etc. as on Christianity.
I definitely appreciate your point. I've always looked at it from the other direction, that Atheism is the religion infiltrating the schools and being forced on our children. I'm basing this on my own school experiences from a long time ago. My kids are still babies. I'm not arguing for a church-state, I just want the spiritual dimension of our humanity to remain discussable.
How to do that in a way that makes everyone comfortable is obviously a huge question. It didn't seem like such a bad idea to start with "here's what the theory of evolution states about our origins. .. some people believe in a God that orchestrated this, blah blah blah"
i dunno, i feel like it's reasonable in a science class to teach evolution, but also explain how it's still a theory while going over the difference between "laws" and theories, and giving some of the evidence supporting it (and maybe even not supporting it)... and not mentioning any other explanations, beyond the fact that they exist...
personally i believe in God, and whether it's intelligent design or not, i think God probably had a hand in guiding the process of natural selection a bit, but it's not really science (being unprovable EITHER WAY), so it shouldn't really be taught in a science class. my opinion. but what we shouldn't have is anybody saying "IT'S NOT GOD DEFINITELY NOT" (or the opposite). That's exclusionary. Some people on both sides in this debate are really good at not seeing that the other side's arguments might have merit, and attempting to stamp them out.
-bill
Atheism is not being thrust into the schools. No educators (as far as I'm aware) are out and out saying, "God doesn't exist." They're saying, "This is what scientists have figured out, and what we believe to be true." If that happens to conflict with what their parents/priest/rabbi/guy-in-a-turtle-suit tells them, it's something for the kid to figure out, by talking to the various authority figures, deciding what they want to believe, etc.
Science and religion are separate things, and although courses on both have a place in the school, they should be kept separate. The problem is that religious groups are trying to get the religion taught instead of science, by subjugating science with this stuff which is supposed to be compatible with "religious views" when it's not really compatible with anything other than Judeo-Christianity, and isn't even science to begin with.
If a science class needs to teach ID, it also needs to teach solipsism, Tailsteakism, last-Tuesday-ism (i.e. that the universe has only existed since last Tuesday), and every other philosophy which conflicts with evolution. But those are all philosophies, and even if the universe has only existed for five seconds, it's totally consistent with a universe which has been around for 12 trillion years which coalesced from pure chaos without any sort of divine intervention.
I definitely appreciate your point. I've always looked at it from the other direction, that Atheism is the religion infiltrating the schools and being forced on our children. I'm basing this on my own school experiences from a long time ago. My kids are still babies. I'm not arguing for a church-state, I just want the spiritual dimension of our humanity to remain discussable.
The thing is, science does not preclude religion. You can postulate God behind the collapse of quantum states, subtly influencing the universe. Science also says nothing about what caused the Big Bang. One perfectly good explaination is that it was caused by a Higher Power. There is plenty of room in human society for God(ess)(s). Just not in science.
Atheism is not being thrust into the schools. No educators (as far as I'm aware) are out and out saying, "God doesn't exist."
Dunno, I wasn't saying it happens, I was just stating that it shouldn't.
I don't think I disagree with anything you said in this post. But:
But those are all philosophies, and even if the universe has only existed for five seconds, it's totally consistent with a universe which has been around for 12 trillion years which coalesced from pure chaos without any sort of divine intervention.
What's consistent? I don't understand what you mean.
-bill
Didn't Darwin's original writings specifically say that evolution was a random process, thereby stating that God had no part in it? I think that leaves a bad taste in the mouth of many non-evolutionists. Anyway, some people have tried to say that science precludes religion, even though I think they're wrong.
And all this doesn't even touch upon the strict creationist stuff, which says that evolution didn't happen at all...
-bill
What's consistent? I don't understand what you mean.
All the observed facts are consistent with a universe which has been around for 12 trillion years and has coalesced from a primordial soup of randomness. They're also consistent with a universe which was simulated that way in a computer, or a universe which is taking place in a giant instance of Conway's Game of Life which has been modified to include relativistic effects, and so on.
What's external to this universe is immaterial to science, as science deals with the system we're in.
Darwin's original writings stated that random changes coupled with selection due to fitness would lead to the observed changes in species over time.
Darwin himself believed in God, and didn't deny the possibility of unobserved intrusions of God. (I.e. miracles)
Of course, a hundred years later, with the discovery and investigation of DNA, we can tell exactly how these random changes occur in an extremely detailed fashion. Darwin said that random changes (mutations) were part of a theory that explained the observed changes in species. A hundred years later, scientists learned that mutations were caused by base-pair mismatches and in the present day, scientists can give detailed mechanisms for how these mistakes occur, including assigning probabilities for mutations on specific points in the DNA strand.
(That's a huge confirmation of the theory, by the way, one of a number that Darwin's theory predicted.)
So whether or not the idea of randomness leaves a bad taste in your mouth, scientists today can prove that it exists. It's been observed happening in test-tubes repeatedly. When someone gets skin cancer because UV radiation caused a base-pair to flip, that's a direct physical description of the "random" process Darwin was talking about.
Of cource, this is no different than the observation that apples always fall. Both are simple observations. And if you believe in God, then you believe that God could perform a miracle and make the apple not fall. Or, that God could perform a miracle and make a certain mutation occur. Neither belief denies that there are natural laws that usually control things (Gravity in one case, Evolution by Natural selection in the other. ) Both are cases "miracles" in the sense that they represent natural law being overridden. If you believe in God and miracles, that's fine. But the ID people want to go one step further and say not that God can break his own laws, but that despite all evidence that God made a certain law, that it doesn't exist. They want to replace an exceedingly detailed mechanism and strongly confirmed theory of how animals changed over time with a simple statement that, well, God made animals change in whatever fashion, whenever, according entirely to his whims.
That is exactly like saying that gravity doesn't exist, but that God just makes things fall however He feels like at any particular time, and that the theory of gravity promotes atheism because it implies that God doesn't decide individually for every single object when and where it should fall.
thanks fluffy, it's better explained put that way.
ucblockhead
So whether or not the idea of randomness leaves a bad taste in your mouth
remember i didn't say it bothers me, but i do have friends that would be, and it's certainly worth listening to their viewpoints...
But the ID people want to go one step further and say not that God can break his own laws, but that despite all evidence that God made a certain law, that it doesn't exist. They want to replace an exceedingly detailed mechanism and strongly confirmed theory of how animals changed over time with a simple statement that, well, God made animals change in whatever fashion, whenever, according entirely to his whims.
seriously? i thought the id people were saying that god worked through the laws, not against them... show me someplace where this is written, please?
-bill
To me, the laws of nature are God, and in that sense, God is beautiful.
(This does not conflict with my being an atheist.)
Incidentally, once upon a time I had a roommate who was a fellow CS major, who loved to point out to me that my sshd keypair wasn't truly random because there's no such thing as true randomness. I asked him how so, because sshd doesn't use a PRNG but an entropy pool filled with nondeterministic events, and he said something like, "Well, everything is preordained; those are the random numbers God intended to be chosen."
I (diplomatically) told him that even if that were the case, there's no way we can predict what those numbers are so at least from our frame of reference it's truly random.
It is important to note that Darwin's theory does not require true randomness in any mathematical sense. The only sense that it is "random" is that the changes are not directed toward a goal and instead it is the nonrandom selection of these changes that causes direction.
A good way to think of it is like draw poker. Imagine being dealt a random hand, and then throwing out the cards you didn't want. Now imagine doing that repeatedly. How long before you'd get to a royal flush?
On average, 649740 hands. A long time for a human, a blink of the eye for the universe. Never mind, you meant with a progressively-changing hand. That'd be much quicker.
(I just wanted to show off that I know simple combinatorics. :)
There is a non-zero probability of that happening, actually, but that's a bit of a disingenuous statement, since it's not as if life randomly formed exactly as it is now - it was (most likely) random collections of chemicals which bumped together and formed amino acids which happened to react in such a way as to produce more amino acids, which eventually led to full proteins and enzymes which were able to self-replicate, and so on and so on until life formed.
In most likelihood, it's not a process which happened overnight. It took millions of years. It's not something where you can just take a petri dish and fill it with carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, spark a spark plug, and expect to start seeing fully-formed amoebas in an hour.
Hmm... well, I believe that I have an interesting point of view from which to add to this conversation. Being a high school student myself, I can confirm that god has never been mentioned in any of my science classes, neither in agreement or disagreement with religious theories. In fact, only my social studies class has discussed anything regarding god or the church, and that's because it's a european history class, and the church is one of the only things there was back then.
I personally have no problem with evolution being taught in science classes. I also have no problem with christianity being taught in a class of its own, as long as it's not the only religion being taught. In fact, I would almost certainly take a Tailsteakism Philosophy class, were it offered.
I'd love to see a "survey of religion" class in high schools. If you want to promote spirituality, teach kids about all religions and let them make an informed choice.
My (private, non-religious) high school, actually, had just that. Year-long required course with an overview of world religions and their impact on cultures.
Couldn't do that in a public school, oh no. Can't tell the kiddies that there's more than one faith out there, and that the other ones aren't all evil...
Can't tell the kiddies that there's more than one faith out there, and that the other ones aren't all evil...
Quite so, though the ones to blame for that are the parents. I'm certain that, if a public school started to teach a class like that, all of the deeply religious parents would sue them for forcing hedonism onto their children. And, while those lawsuits would have almost no chance in court, the sheer number of them would likely cause the school to attempt to simply settle with the parents, rather than go through every single one. That much money lost by the school would force them to stop not only the religion class, but likely many of the electives, such as theater, choir, band, and others... Of course, the flow of money going to the sports teams wouldn't be cut short at all, because they're oh so important...
I may be wrong about the legal system bits of this, by the way, and I apologize for it in advance.
This sort of argument reminds me why I generally don't get involved in the debate, I just sit in the back and quietly smirk at how right I am... The debate regarding whether or not God has a hand in evolution did remind me of something from a history class a while back though. I believe it was shortly before the foundation of the US that the concept of God as a "watchmaker" was popular amongst deists, especially the sort of gents that found countries... The concept goes that whatever deity there is created the universe with all of it's attendant laws, wound it up, and let it go. Provided a slightly looser interpretation of that, (i.e. the watch isn't so precise as to make all things predetermined) evolution serving as another cog in the machine makes a lot of sense.
Comments
I know it is true. Prove me wrong!
This is one of the problems that is being exploited by the creationists - the scientific usage of the word 'theory' and the everyday use are substantially different.
Evolution is a Theory. Intelligent design is a Hypothesis.
Also, evolution isn't proven but there's a hell of a lot of evidence for it. Not to mention that it works really well in many contexts (for example, in the world of genetic algorithms, where all you specify is the rules of an evolutionary niche and what you get out is a really diverse set of totally off-the-wall random creations which just happen to fill that niche, usually better than what any human can come up with).
What sickens me is that the pro-faith anti-science agenda is so caught up in making sure everyone knows about their fairy stories that they have no tolerance for things which are firmly set in the real world.
Where does faith come from? It's an easy way out from trying to explain that which isn't explained yet. It's a way of saying, "Well, we don't know what happened, so it must have been God's doing." Which is all fine and good, but then when people who are more curious actually set out to figure out the actual mechanisms in place, the faithful get offended that someone else might have an alternate explanation which doesn't involve such an easy crutch.
(Obviously I'm an atheist. Personally I think it's far more beautiful to think that the universe as it is, including all of its great works, came out of a primordial mass of chaos which evolved over trillions of years, than it does to say, "Oh, some guy decided it should be this way.")
Faith is really perpendicular to science. These conflicts come about when scientists start having too much faith in their theories and religious people think their domain is being trampled on. Or when overzealous religious people deem science "too dangerous!"
True faith should encourage science, because it explores the magnificent intricacies of the created universe.
ID isn't science, and shouldn't be in a science curriculum. I don't mind it being taught in, say, history, or creative writing.
well, I don't understand that statement at all, but I am assuming the faith is in a God that is powerful enough to create a universe that abides by complex scientific principles.
and I don't know that I'm suggesting teaching ID either. I mean, there's not much to teach. But if evolution is being taught as an undebatable fact, then there is a problem. *that's* not science.
intelligent design alleges that God or a god or some gods having created or done things is the best explanation, and in essence alleges we can't know how that came about. so how can you teach something that lies outside of the traditional scientific boundary, with no evidence or testable hypotheses? some people have disbelief regarding evolution. fine. some people don't believe the sky appears blue, or that men have what's called a Y chromosome. science currently disproves both, and science at large has found evolution to be the most tenable of all proposed theories for the reason why we have a diverse amount of species in this world. scientists don't like evolution for its own sake, they believe it because it's a sensible theory that works with the preponderance of evidence. when the evidence is verifiably counter to evolution's theory, then they change the theory where it appears to be false. but i don't know how, or why, you'd teach schoolchildren "some people believe that a god, or an alien, or some aliens, or some gods, or the judeo-moslem-christian god specifically, had his hand in some, or all, or no parts of this process, but they don't have any evidence (except for a lack of theory) and they don't have any theory (except for a lack of evidence). nor do they have any testable hypotheses, because they believe it lies outside of
intelligent design only posits untestable speculation in gaps of current knowledge, and that's, regrettably, unscientific. currently there is no doubt the world is an oblate spheroid, that is, round. if it was not, on clear days i could see mount rainier. imagine if some 11th-century catholics were transported here and found that view mocking and blasphemous. where do we draw the line between respecting legitimate, untestable, no-evidence religious views, and respecting and teaching legitimate, testable, evidentiary scientific ones?
As a parent, I don't want a science teacher to gloss over the inadequacies of evolution in an attempt at convincing my children that there is no God. I want them to be given the facts so they can decide for themselves.
As a parent, I've already come to the conclusion that I'll have to be the source of the bulk of my child's science education. Politics has dumbed down public science education to the point of worthlessness.
Frankly, denying evolution is ignorant, as is claiming that evolution is opposed to the belief in God. Even the Catholic church agrees on that!
ID can't be tested, because it can't be disproven and there is no evidence which points to ID which can't be explained by something else as well.
Strictly-speaking, the theory of gravity is not a fact, it is a theory that objects exert a force on all other objects proportional to their mass divided by the square of their distances. It isn't even particularly accurate; it's just an approximation which happens to work at the macro scale for objects which are fairly moderate in size and mass (peanuts to planets), relatively close to each other (millimeters to planetary systems), and not moving at high relative velocities (less than a few megameters per second). That happens to contain a large amount of what we're familiar with, but is a tiny fraction of the grand scheme of things.
Given the lack of spiritual significance, I'm not too concerned about how thoroughly it is presented to children. It should not be presented as fact in a college physics class.
So now you say that the sorts of theories that got people executed in the 1600s because the powers that be thought they promoted athiesm have "no spiritial significance".
I'm not talking about anything being pro- or anti- God. I'm talking about emphasizing our collective lack of scientific evidence regarding the origin of life.
The theory of evolution is science. The theory of intelligent design is philosophy. It should not be taught as science.
There is no "lack of scientific evidence regarding the origin of life". There are reams and reams of data concerning the origin of life, and all point to the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection.
well, wherever you want to put it in the curriculum is fine with me.
as if psychology was a real science or something.
I have a confession to make. I'm not a biologist. I don't know anything about the proof of anything regarding the origins of life. Perhaps I would make a good ID supporter. What I don't want to be is a biblically spellbound reactionary/zealot. I'm going to go read a book or something.
The only reason I thrusted myself in this discussion was because I do believe in God, and I have been frustrated by the trend of eliminating all things spiritual from schools. I hate the idea of a science class destroying nascent notions of God.
Freedom of religion means that you can practice whatever religion you want. It does not mean that you get to use the government to force your religion on other people and their children.
And make no mistake...this isn't about religion in general. It's about certain branches of the Christian religion. You don't see kids pledging allegiance under Vishnu, nor do you see people demanding that Buddhist creation myths be taught in school.
It's not about "spiritual" things in the school. It's about one belief system being forced on the children of parents who believe in many belief systems.
If you want spiritual things in schools, fine, but you sure as hell be planning on spending as much time on Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Taoism, Buddhism, etc. as on Christianity.
How to do that in a way that makes everyone comfortable is obviously a huge question. It didn't seem like such a bad idea to start with "here's what the theory of evolution states about our origins. .. some people believe in a God that orchestrated this, blah blah blah"
personally i believe in God, and whether it's intelligent design or not, i think God probably had a hand in guiding the process of natural selection a bit, but it's not really science (being unprovable EITHER WAY), so it shouldn't really be taught in a science class. my opinion. but what we shouldn't have is anybody saying "IT'S NOT GOD DEFINITELY NOT" (or the opposite). That's exclusionary. Some people on both sides in this debate are really good at not seeing that the other side's arguments might have merit, and attempting to stamp them out.
-bill
Science and religion are separate things, and although courses on both have a place in the school, they should be kept separate. The problem is that religious groups are trying to get the religion taught instead of science, by subjugating science with this stuff which is supposed to be compatible with "religious views" when it's not really compatible with anything other than Judeo-Christianity, and isn't even science to begin with.
If a science class needs to teach ID, it also needs to teach solipsism, Tailsteakism, last-Tuesday-ism (i.e. that the universe has only existed since last Tuesday), and every other philosophy which conflicts with evolution. But those are all philosophies, and even if the universe has only existed for five seconds, it's totally consistent with a universe which has been around for 12 trillion years which coalesced from pure chaos without any sort of divine intervention.
The thing is, science does not preclude religion. You can postulate God behind the collapse of quantum states, subtly influencing the universe. Science also says nothing about what caused the Big Bang. One perfectly good explaination is that it was caused by a Higher Power. There is plenty of room in human society for God(ess)(s). Just not in science.
Dunno, I wasn't saying it happens, I was just stating that it shouldn't.
I don't think I disagree with anything you said in this post. But:
What's consistent? I don't understand what you mean.
-bill
Didn't Darwin's original writings specifically say that evolution was a random process, thereby stating that God had no part in it? I think that leaves a bad taste in the mouth of many non-evolutionists. Anyway, some people have tried to say that science precludes religion, even though I think they're wrong.
And all this doesn't even touch upon the strict creationist stuff, which says that evolution didn't happen at all...
-bill
All the observed facts are consistent with a universe which has been around for 12 trillion years and has coalesced from a primordial soup of randomness. They're also consistent with a universe which was simulated that way in a computer, or a universe which is taking place in a giant instance of Conway's Game of Life which has been modified to include relativistic effects, and so on.
What's external to this universe is immaterial to science, as science deals with the system we're in.
Darwin himself believed in God, and didn't deny the possibility of unobserved intrusions of God. (I.e. miracles)
Of course, a hundred years later, with the discovery and investigation of DNA, we can tell exactly how these random changes occur in an extremely detailed fashion. Darwin said that random changes (mutations) were part of a theory that explained the observed changes in species. A hundred years later, scientists learned that mutations were caused by base-pair mismatches and in the present day, scientists can give detailed mechanisms for how these mistakes occur, including assigning probabilities for mutations on specific points in the DNA strand.
(That's a huge confirmation of the theory, by the way, one of a number that Darwin's theory predicted.)
So whether or not the idea of randomness leaves a bad taste in your mouth, scientists today can prove that it exists. It's been observed happening in test-tubes repeatedly. When someone gets skin cancer because UV radiation caused a base-pair to flip, that's a direct physical description of the "random" process Darwin was talking about.
Of cource, this is no different than the observation that apples always fall. Both are simple observations. And if you believe in God, then you believe that God could perform a miracle and make the apple not fall. Or, that God could perform a miracle and make a certain mutation occur. Neither belief denies that there are natural laws that usually control things (Gravity in one case, Evolution by Natural selection in the other. ) Both are cases "miracles" in the sense that they represent natural law being overridden. If you believe in God and miracles, that's fine. But the ID people want to go one step further and say not that God can break his own laws, but that despite all evidence that God made a certain law, that it doesn't exist. They want to replace an exceedingly detailed mechanism and strongly confirmed theory of how animals changed over time with a simple statement that, well, God made animals change in whatever fashion, whenever, according entirely to his whims.
That is exactly like saying that gravity doesn't exist, but that God just makes things fall however He feels like at any particular time, and that the theory of gravity promotes atheism because it implies that God doesn't decide individually for every single object when and where it should fall.
remember i didn't say it bothers me, but i do have friends that would be, and it's certainly worth listening to their viewpoints...
seriously? i thought the id people were saying that god worked through the laws, not against them... show me someplace where this is written, please?
-bill
(This does not conflict with my being an atheist.)
Incidentally, once upon a time I had a roommate who was a fellow CS major, who loved to point out to me that my sshd keypair wasn't truly random because there's no such thing as true randomness. I asked him how so, because sshd doesn't use a PRNG but an entropy pool filled with nondeterministic events, and he said something like, "Well, everything is preordained; those are the random numbers God intended to be chosen."
I (diplomatically) told him that even if that were the case, there's no way we can predict what those numbers are so at least from our frame of reference it's truly random.
A good way to think of it is like draw poker. Imagine being dealt a random hand, and then throwing out the cards you didn't want. Now imagine doing that repeatedly. How long before you'd get to a royal flush?
On average, 649740 hands. A long time for a human, a blink of the eye for the universe.Never mind, you meant with a progressively-changing hand. That'd be much quicker.(I just wanted to show off that I know simple combinatorics. :)
Which when you compare it to just the chance of getting a royal flush on a random deal, shows how powerful the selection from random sources is.
In most likelihood, it's not a process which happened overnight. It took millions of years. It's not something where you can just take a petri dish and fill it with carbon, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, spark a spark plug, and expect to start seeing fully-formed amoebas in an hour.
I personally have no problem with evolution being taught in science classes. I also have no problem with christianity being taught in a class of its own, as long as it's not the only religion being taught. In fact, I would almost certainly take a Tailsteakism Philosophy class, were it offered.
Couldn't do that in a public school, oh no. Can't tell the kiddies that there's more than one faith out there, and that the other ones aren't all evil...
Quite so, though the ones to blame for that are the parents. I'm certain that, if a public school started to teach a class like that, all of the deeply religious parents would sue them for forcing hedonism onto their children. And, while those lawsuits would have almost no chance in court, the sheer number of them would likely cause the school to attempt to simply settle with the parents, rather than go through every single one. That much money lost by the school would force them to stop not only the religion class, but likely many of the electives, such as theater, choir, band, and others... Of course, the flow of money going to the sports teams wouldn't be cut short at all, because they're oh so important...
I may be wrong about the legal system bits of this, by the way, and I apologize for it in advance.
49.
What's the next
flamewardiscussion topic gonna be?-bill