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Post by Betterout on Sept 16, 2005 10:29:20 GMT -5
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Post by rickus on Nov 9, 2005 9:07:36 GMT -5
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Post by guest amanda on Nov 9, 2005 16:54:54 GMT -5
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Post by rick on Nov 9, 2005 17:10:58 GMT -5
One small step forward (Dover.) One giant step backward (the whole state of Kansas.)
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Post by amanda mcbride on Nov 9, 2005 18:23:56 GMT -5
The small step is in the right direction, though.
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Post by Tyler on Nov 10, 2005 8:44:38 GMT -5
If I had to read this 1 minute speech in support of ID then the first two weeks of my class would be over a "Why Intelligent Design is moronic." With heavy testing.
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Post by Amanda on Nov 14, 2005 17:53:09 GMT -5
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Post by amanda on Nov 15, 2005 8:33:03 GMT -5
Kansas School Board Redefines Science www.nytimes.com/2005/11/15/science/sciencespecial2/15evol.htmlThe changes in the official state definition are subtle and lawyerly, and involve mainly the removal of two words: "natural explanations." But they are a red flag to scientists, who say the changes obliterate the distinction between the natural and the supernatural that goes back to Galileo and the foundations of science.
The old definition reads in part, "Science is the human activity of seeking natural explanations for what we observe in the world around us." The new one calls science "a systematic method of continuing investigation that uses observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena."
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Post by Jeff on Nov 15, 2005 15:35:49 GMT -5
There was a fascinating, if inane, discussion of Intelligent Design on the Rush Limbaugh show today. Rush was gone, so guest host Mark Belling made a series of very bad arguments in favor of ID. Every point he discussed was decisively refuted more than 100 years ago by Thomas Huxley, “Darwin’s Bulldog,” in a work called Evolution and Ethics ( www.gutenberg.org/etext/2940 ). I heartily recommend it to you. As I was listening to Belling’s anachronistic tirade, I thought about how difficult it is to think straight. No joke; it’s no cakewalk. I don’t know how I learned it myself, but the most important of the intellectual virtues is humility. (Indeed, I have far to go...I know, I know.) Confucius said that to say one knows when one knows and that one does not know when one does not know is the essence of wisdom. That’s good advice. Scientists are not telling us that God does not exist. They are saying that we can explain a great many things without that assumption. Further, the assumption of God’s existence (or that of any intelligent designer) has the double whammy of being in principle (!) both unprovable and unfalsifiable. Once it is in, it’s in for good. And it will have explanatory repercussions, because you can get almost anything out of it. One doesn’t have to be godless to oppose ID, one must merely cherish forms of explanation that took the collective efforts of mankind a couple of thousand years to build. On the other hand, IDers do have some interesting criticisms of evolutionary theory. And scientists need to take these more seriously. It may be that evolution doesn’t make complete mathematical sense, but I cannot ever see how one would move from this (as yet undemonstrated) fact to the scientific acceptability of Intelligent Design. It’s a non-starter. Rather the absolute best IDers can ever hope for is for science to say, “We don’t know, and we have no way of knowing...right now.” We aren’t there yet, not by a long shot, but I trust that scientists know well Confucius’ lesson on intellectual humility. I have grave doubts about the other side. Jeff [Sorry I've modified this so much from its original form. I was proctering an exam while I wrote it and wasn't thinking quite clearly enough.]
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Post by Jeff on Nov 15, 2005 16:24:59 GMT -5
Relevant: Monk-y Brains: The Dalai Lama phones it in. www.slate.com/id/2130455/The notion of Buddhist monks as "contemplative scientists" sounds great to a secular audience. But how seriously should one take it? The Dalai Lama presented the same idea to a Stanford panel on "Spiritual and Scientific Explorations of Human Experience" a few weeks ago, to mixed reactions. The Buddhist scholar Carl Bielefeldt argued that Buddhist monks don't use the scientific method at all. A student who makes an unexpected discovery through introspection might be told by his master that he made a mistake. "It looks like creation science," he said. "There are certain norms that cannot be questioned." PS I disagree with this criticism...
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Post by Jeff on Nov 19, 2005 15:54:43 GMT -5
Well, Cory had a post up here. And I wrote a response, but I guess he took it down. He raised a good question, so I am going to post my response anyway. His question was how we are to conceive of the origin of the universe without some anterior conception like God or primordial chaos. I think he is exactly right to ask. And I have no answer, but I can point to the responses of others who have asked. My Response I hate to answer a question with a question, but exactly how are we to conceive the origin of the universe? If it was much unlike what we have now, then it is hard to think that what counts as evidence today would count under conditions so vastly different. Indeed some of our most basic metaphysical assumptions seem to break down at the point of origin, e.g., every effect has a cause. It is literally impossible to conceive of the universe as lacking a cause, because we define causes and effects in terms of each other. It will always make more sense to ask for a cause than to say the origin was causeless. (That is, unless that origin is a necessary cause of itself, i.e., God.) The point is that our rules for analysis break down. At some point—and scientists tell us it may be simply a few nanoseconds after the big bang—they are simply inapplicable to the events in question. On the other hand, it seems to make sense to ask about the overall probability of the production of intelligent life at the earliest moments in the history of our universe. Thus, our existence may be a kind of limiting condition on theories that seek to explain the origin of the universe. This is sometimes called the “anthropic principle.” I won’t try to describe all the details of this. But some scientists and philosophers think the universe must have been ordered from the beginning to produce beings like us, or to put it slightly better, however we conceive of the origin of the universe it must be in such a way that our own existence is at least consistent with the putative initiating conditions. Depending on how this idea is developed, it could impact theories of evolution. I have suggested elsewhere that I think this is a productive line of thought. But I don’t see how it could ever be used as evidence for Intelligent Design as a competing scientific hypothesis. The natural processes are what they are, and if they are beyond our ken, our scientists will simply say, “We don’t know.” Some links: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principlewww.anthropic-principle.com/www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/barrow.html (This is careful and interesting.)
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Post by Tyler on Nov 19, 2005 16:11:09 GMT -5
Time is not omnipresent. It is a feature, a component, a byproduct of matter. Without matter there is no time. You cannot have an origin if there is no prior state. If there is no yesterday. For the emptiness between the stars, there is no time. If there is a conciousness there, independant of form or matter, then the idea of creating something, or the concept of alteration altogether, would be as alien to it as the idea of non-time is to us. Science has proved the absence of God many times over. It's not a matter of looking in holes for Him, but in looking for the holes in Him.
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Post by Jeff on Nov 19, 2005 16:42:14 GMT -5
Where did the matter come from, Tyler?
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Post by Jeff on Nov 19, 2005 17:27:49 GMT -5
www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/17/AR2005111701304.html"How ridiculous to make evolution the enemy of God. What could be more elegant, more simple, more brilliant, more economical, more creative, indeed more divine than a planet with millions of life forms, distinct and yet interactive, all ultimately derived from accumulated variations in a single double-stranded molecule, pliable and fecund enough to give us mollusks and mice, Newton and Einstein? Even if it did give us the Kansas State Board of Education, too."
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Post by chris on Nov 19, 2005 17:41:56 GMT -5
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Post by Jeff on Nov 19, 2005 17:45:03 GMT -5
Sorry, Chris. I have to do at least 10 moronic things a day. That one was part of my quota.
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Post by Tyler on Nov 20, 2005 12:18:49 GMT -5
"Come from" implies time. Time is matter is time. The only reason we see a difference is because we are it. If there is no "before" there is no "after". But, let's say that we accept the premises in the question. "Where did the matter come from?" Are you implying that for something to exist, something had to of come before it to create it?
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Post by Jeff on Nov 20, 2005 14:01:17 GMT -5
On the contrary, there are two senses of origins. The first is genetic or origins considered as an aspect of inheritance, a relation that makes sense even if there is no such thing as objective time. (BTW I absolutely agree with you about that.) But there is also what might be called a coordinate analysis, which is an analysis of constitutive parts. Again, even if there is no such thing as objective space, this relation still makes sense. (And again, I agree that there is no objective space.)
My claim is that it still makes sense to ask what the original matter inherited its characteristics from and what it was constituted by. These questions make sense even if the answer was something that defied objective space and time, e.g., our universe inherited from and was constituted from the matter of a universe 10 dimensions away and a billion years in the future from now.
Jeff
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Post by Tyler on Nov 21, 2005 8:20:19 GMT -5
Ohhhh, good one. How do these two senses account for cycles? Let's say you had a series of two atoms of hydrogen that continually combined to form helium and separated again. Lets say that this is what constituted all of all.
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Post by Betterout on Nov 21, 2005 11:44:23 GMT -5
Tyler, I think you'll have to admit that at the very least there were states prior to the one we're experiencing now. For instance, the state we're experiencing...NOW. And now. And now. The progression of states from form to form is the basis for our interepretation of just about everything from descriptions of biological species to languages to art forms, etc. And that's just across a small human lifespan. You can't really deny that matter has progressed in one way or another in the cosmic lifespan(s) looking backward from where we now stand. That is the heart of our studies of astrophysics (the big scale is a blurry world where science and philosophy meet, much like the small scale). Objects are hurdling out, say some, from a central universal location, and the faster they're moving, the farther away they are from us. Well, call it the big bang, or whatever. At some point in the lifespan there was an aggregation of matter. Simple causation, now... what brought that together? What was matter like on a causative scale prior to its aggregation?
Scientists now believe that the bang will result not in a contraction, a reunion of this matter (which some have used to argue the case for a cycle, as you say, of big bangs followed by big collapses, followed by big bangs, etc), but in a dispersal. The universe of matter will eventually be a thin cloud of uniformly dispersed particles. So we have no model for calling this a cycle, at least at this point. It looks like if there were a cycle prior to this bang, this one's the last gasp. Yes, on a colossal scale, this thin cloud may be no different from all matter existing at a single point--you're right about that. But our current methods don't get us back to a renewal of the cycle from the thin cloud. Some have thus called our universal end the Big Whimper.
If time=matter=time, and matter always existed, then time is a persistent property that we can always use. It would make sense for us to talk about time at any point in the lifespan. For time to be irrelevant, there has to be or at least has to have been a matter-free state. But certainly this begs a question: Which is it? I think that you have to yield one direction or another. Either we can speak about time prior to the aggregation of all matter (and thus, you'd have to at least admit the possibility of speaking about the pre-history of the aggregation), or there was a point in which there was no matter in the universe (and thus, you'd have to account for how it got here). I definitely have none of these answers, but let's not kill the questions before we try our hands at answering them, or in some cases even asking them.
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