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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: greenspirit who wrote (213439)	1/1/2002 7:21:53 PM
From: J_F_Shepard	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 769670

"Article...Forms of Design and the Nature of God " That's mostly psuedoscience and I was asking you some questions...I don't plan to reply to a cut and pasted dissertation of someone. But a couple of points I will comment on: The treatise makes the point that to believe scientists you must accept chance as the reason things happen. Scientists do deal in probabilities and chance but when they publish their data it is surrounded by error bars showing the probability of error. Further work will usually be carried out to reduce the errors and the size of the error bars. In the discussion of chance your author uses the coin flip as an example and says that the chance of getting 10 heads in a row is 1/2 x1/2 x......10 times ie that the chance is 1 in 1024. That's bull....a coin flip is not dependent on the previous flip ...each flip is a independent event with a 50-50 chance of getting a head. I can almost guarantee you that if you flip 10 times you will not get 5 heads and 5 tails. In science it is not chance that has learned that the number of atoms in a gram molecular weight of a material is 6.023E23; science did not learn by chance the weight and size of atoms to 4 or more decimal places. If you ask an astronomer or astrophysicist when we well have an eclipse 1000 years from now, he will not only tell you the year but also the exact month, day, and time of day to the second. He will tell you where to stand on the planet to view it in its entirety or just 34% of entirety. This is not chance. Newton, more than 300 years ago, described the laws of gravity mathematically and they are still used to this day. Einstein refined those laws with his General Theory of Relativity to include speeds near the speed of light and immense weights like black holes......this is not chance.....