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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (96361)	4/25/2003 11:30:26 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

This is a good debate and I have heard it in several forums (and forms), including of all places in support of I-Ching. I tend to believe abstract reasoning over other evidences. It is trumped only by personal and accurate observation...back to evidence for creationism. Solid evidence, for me, would have been in the form of showing that there was a sudden mass creation. From what we know of the fossils found, most of these prehistoric creatures could not have coexisted. Why in the world would God go through the process of creating and destroying so many varying and similar creatures, if the end result was to be the world as we know it? Why wouldn't he just make it as is right from the start? While we are at it, why is it that kangaroos, penguins, and Koalas exist? Noah could have only saved the creatures that lived near him. I don't recall a passage saying he went to Australia to save a few of these and then came back to the middle east.

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (96361)	4/26/2003 12:56:34 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

I forgot to add, there is an element of faith in every kind of proof. Even when you are doing scientific analysis, you have faith that the evidence you did not collect (say the phase of the moon or the number of roaches in the building) was not important. As well, your decision to stop collecting the "relevant" evidence and start analyzing it is also a leap of faith...still, that is not reason enough to believe Noah took a trip to Australia or that God just wanted to have fun creating destroying a lot of animals only to replace them with the ones with minor variation.

To: Jacob Snyder who wrote (96361)	4/26/2003 6:28:09 PM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

Depends on who is societies' arbiters of Truth. To many, scientists are just the priest class of a Secular Humanist religion, and therefore their pronouncements and writings have no more validity than what other holy men say. This is sadly true. So, for instance, I believe in genes and atoms. Why? I've never seen one, and neither have you, or anyone else I know. When I see "proofs" that they exist, or even pictures of them in the sacred texts of the scientists, I accept those proofs because I Believe in Science. When I see a picture in a book, of an electron microscope image of a chromasome, I depend entirely on others to tell me what it means. I have no direct evidence. What meaning I get from it, depends on trusting the people who took the picture and interpreted it. So, the proofs rest on revealed truth by Authority I accept. Just like the Bible. That anyone in this millennium asserts that the scientific principles our understanding of the world around us is based on is "Just like the Bible" exhibits an almost stupefying lack of scientific culture. The fact that one cannot "see" an atom in no way calls into question their physical reality. You yourself having studied medicine should have learned the limits of the resolving power of optical microscopy in undergraduate school; this is a part of any good college level molecular biology text (eg, chapter 4 of Watson et al "The Cell"...). The elucidation of the chemical structure of DNA was announced 50 years ago the other day by one of the authors of the above textbook. This understanding was enabled by the elaboration of basic non relativistic quantum mechanics a quarter century earlier. This subject matter is by now absolutely classical scientific theory, not open to polemic debates. It's not possible in a short message to even scratch the barest surface of the collective, reproducible scientific evidence that demonstrates the reality of the underlying structures of the world around us, structures like the double helix, the elements making up the periodic table, the particles making up the elements, Maxwell's equations, quantum electrodynamics, etc... Nobody has to "see" atoms to understand the results of X-ray diffraction experiments, Rutherford's scattering of alpha particles, the Compton effect, the Stern-Gerlach type experiments exhibiting "spin", super fluidity of Helium 3 (Bose-Einstein statistics versus Fermi-Dirac statistics) neutron diffraction, the background radiation left over from the Big Bang, red shift. Coming to grips with this indirectly palpable physical reality of the world around us is the degree-zero of coming to grips with any kind of contemporary scientific education at all. All these phenomena are based on the same kinds of reproducible experiences that make up the most basic everyday understanding of the world around us. The Bible or the Koran, to name just two, on the other hand are full of concepts about the world around us that are nothing more than parochial wishful thinking, and in fact exhibit a singular lack of imagination in the face of the incredible structure of the universe as we currently understand it. This structure is so amazing that nobody would have had the imagination to invent it ab initio, certainly not nomadic people living in the desert. It is only the collective progression of knowledge of man passing on and improving on knowledge of previous generations that has made it possible. Contrast this with the Bible brandished by the Creationists - cast in stone, an absolute insult to the dignity of human intellect. If these people want to live in a society that doesn't evolve, I suggest going back to live in the trees like apes, since that's a species with a culture that hasn't evolved. It's all the more aberrant that these revealed religions have the arrogance to create their God in man's own image !! I'm not saying anything about whatever spiritual meaning there is in the various revealed religions, but where coming to grips with the reality of the world around us is concerned, these books no longer have a lot to offer. This rant would be completely OT if it weren't for the fact that for any culture today to take it's place as a thriving member of the human race collectively, it is going to be necessary for that culture to put religion in it's proper perspective. If not, such cultures will be simply left behind in the wake of progress made by others here on this low world.