Posted on 01/20/2002 12:07:19 PM PST by PatrickHenry
In one of the most existentially penetrating statements ever made by a scientist, Richard Dawkins concluded that "the universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference."
Facing such a reality, perhaps we should not be surprised at the results of a 2001 Gallup poll confirming that 45 percent of Americans believe "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so"; 37 percent prefer a blended belief that "human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God guided this process"; and a paltry 12 percent accept the standard scientific theory that "human beings have developed over millions of years from less advanced forms of life, but God had no part in this process."
In a forced binary choice between the "theory of creationism" and the "theory of evolution," 57 percent chose creationism against only 33 percent for evolution (10 percent said that they were "unsure"). One explanation for these findings can be seen in additional results showing that just 34 percent considered themselves to be "very informed" about evolution.
Although such findings are disturbing, truth in science is not determined democratically. It does not matter what percentage of the public believes a theory. It must stand or fall on the evidence, and there are few theories in science that are more robust than the theory of evolution. The preponderance of evidence from numerous converging lines of inquiry (geology, paleontology, zoology, botany, comparative anatomy, genetics, biogeography, and so on) points to the same conclusion--evolution is real. The 19th-century philosopher of science William Whewell called this process of independent lines of inquiry converging together to a conclusion a "consilience of inductions." I call it a "convergence of evidence." Whatever you call it, it is how historical events are proved.
The reason we are experiencing this peculiarly American phenomenon of evolution denial (the doppelgnäger of Holocaust denial, using the same techniques of rhetoric and debate) is that a small but vocal minority of religious fundamentalists misread the theory of evolution as a challenge to their deeply held religious convictions. Given this misunderstanding, their response is to attack the theory. It is no coincidence that most evolution deniers are Christians who believe that if God did not personally create life, then they have no basis for belief, morality and the meaning of life. Clearly for some, much is at stake in the findings of science.
Because the Constitution prohibits public schools from promoting any brand of religion, this has led to the oxymoronic movement known as "creation science" or, in its more recent incarnation, "intelligent design" (ID). ID (aka God) miraculously intervenes just in the places where science has yet to offer a comprehensive explanation for a particular phenomenon. (ID used to control the weather, but now that we understand it, He has moved on to more difficult problems, such as the origins of DNA and cellular life. Once these problems are mastered, then ID will no doubt find even more intractable conundrums.) Thus, IDers would have us teach children nonthreatening theories of science, but when it comes to the origins of life and certain aspects of evolution, children are to learn that "ID did it." I fail to see how this is science--or what, exactly, ID-ers hope will be taught in these public schools. "ID did it" makes for a rather short semester.
To counter the nefarious influence of the ID creationists, we need to employ a proactive strategy of science education and evolution explanation. It is not enough to argue that creationism is wrong; we must also show that evolution is right. The theory's founder, Charles Darwin, knew this when he reflected: "It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men's minds which follows from the advance of science."
Michael Shermer [the author] is founding publisher of Skeptic magazine (www.skeptic.com) and author of The Borderlands of Science.
Thanx.
The Jack Chick link was for people like you. The post outlining the problem which evolutionism has with the laws of probability was for intelligent readers.
My contention however,is what caused the BB, and how did the initiation process start( way before 10E-36 seconds occured)?
In the explanation I linked above, I explained that at the Big Bang, time folds back upon itself, and all directions point to the future. In the context of our time dimension, therefore, the Big Bang is an uncaused event, and that's all we can ever know about it. So your question becomes, why does the universe exist at all?
This gets us back to Heidegger's fundamental question of philosophy, which is, why does anything exist? Why the universe? Why God? Why existence itself? Why not just nothing? I don't think that's answerable. All we can do is note that "existence exists", and take it as an axiom.
The big mystery to me is, why are there more matter than anti matter in the Universe we live in? Should symetry require that there should have been equal amounts? If there were equal amounts, woun't the anti matter, and matter distroy each other, leaving the Universe with nothing but eternal radiation?
That's actually a problem I've worked on. The immediate reason there is an imbalance between matter and antimatter is from an effect called CP-violation. The deeper question of why CP-violation exists is not yet answered, but we're closing in on it.
There are three discrete symmetries obeyed by quantum field theories: "C", or charge conjugation, which is the swapping of matter and anti-matter; "P", or parity, which is the reversal of space; and "T", which is the reversal of time. It was originally thought that the quantum field theories exhibited in nature were invariant under all of these transformations. For example, if an interaction is P-invariant, that means that when you look at the physics in a mirror, it "makes sense". If an interaction is T-invariant, the physics still makes sense if you play the film backwards.
In the 1950's, it was discovered that the weak interaction violates parity. There is a distinct "handedness" to weak decays. C. N. Yang and T. D. Lee got the Nobel Prize for this discovery. However, it was quickly shown that all of the known weak interactions were still invariant under CP: that is to say, if you theoretically replaced all the particles with their antiparticles and watched it in a mirror, the physics would end up the same.
Well, to make a long story short, ultimately some decays were discovered that violate the CP symmetry. If CP were strictly conserved, then particles and antiparticles would always decay at the same rates into "conjugate" states (i.e. the matter and antimatter versions of the same state), but sometimes this isn't true. Matter and antimatter decay differently. The difference is slight, but it's measurable.
CP violation is being studied in exquisite detail right now, particularly using B mesons at the Belle and BaBar experiments. There are several possible known mechanisms for creating CP violation both within and beyond the Standard Model. We don't yet know which mechanism is the right one (none of the above? more than one?), but we'll know in the next few years.
Once you have ansewered these simple minded questions, then we could move on to the next phase of the debate: why this improbable(perhaps only to me in this tread at the moment)Universe exists.
Any possible universe is gigantically improbable, but some universe had to exist. It may seem a miracle that our universe is just right for us, but that's looking at it the wrong way 'round: given a universe, it's inevitable that we would have been just right for it.
But Jack Chick is about as far away as you can get from a scientific argument. I might as well be citing Clinton as a source on ethics.
Check out the quadrillion-year time frame link and the link to the WISTAR symposia. You had a series of symposia in which a number of the world's best mathematicians told the evos they were totally out to lunch and the evos have been in a state of denial since then. When you get guys like Fred Hoyle and Bob Bass saying the same thing on the subject, you can take it to the bank. Modern mathematics and evolution are incompatible; deal with it.
That is my view exactly. My doing physics is my way of worship.
I have a friend who works at a bioinformatics firm, he has a real doctorate in mathematics. I'll ask him if he thinks evolution is incompatible with math.
big difference between using untruthfulness and believing untruthfulness. The one is a sometimes effective strategy for improving your odds in the Darwinian War, the second, at least on average, is a way to make your odds worse.
There's nothing "paltry" about 30 million American citizens, especially when many of them are educated and well-to-do.
Have you a basis for this assertion? Has anybody done a census? Do truthful men in fact procreate more than the lying Cassanova? I suspect it is impossible to get a straight answer; it's like those logic problems: one knight sometimes lies, but you don't know which one...
This cannot be since where there is no obedience, there is no virtue; and where there is no virtue there is no good.
Reason doesn't necessitate virtue because the will [and thereby passions] often overrides the conscience.
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