Posted on 09/29/2005 7:32:43 AM PDT by Right Wing Professor
Yeah, an unknown entity. Sure. That's right (Nudge, wink). Could be anyone. Er, I mean Anyone.
When scientists can write book after book saying nothing preceded the big bang, or it doesn't matter because there is no way of figuring it out, then I can not take scientists seriously at that point. They leave the realm of science at that point. Or that once time and space are totally crushed in ablack hole's singularity who knows they may be emerging in another universe but hey that doesn't matter because no information can escape from a black hole and we can never know. Or that at the smallest level we can never see the tiniest elements of matter because it's smaller than a photon, and BTW at some point we can never know where the particle is, it occupies all possible locations at once. And then there is the ability for the behavior of one particle to affect another at a distance with no physical connection.
I'm not saying this to insult scientists or religious, but what scientists don't know and can't comprehend is astounding, and if you doubt me wait until 1000 years from now and I fairly confidently assure you all present scientific "fact" will have been rewritten.
It is astoundingly arrogant and ignorant for an intelligent scientist to assess all they don't know and can't even think about, and then insist they "know" that the answers all lead to randomness.
"When scientists can write book after book saying nothing preceded the big bang, "
Hmm...could you point me to one of those books, please? I haven't seen any such statement in a serious book on astrophysics.
Perhaps you found this in a creationist's book or website. It doesn't sound much like what an scientist would say. A scientist might say he didn't know, but he's unlikely to make a statement like that one.
So, a reference, please?
February 2005, "Testing Darwin", by Carl Zimmer.
The whole article is here:
Great paragraph: "The Avida team makes their software freely available on the Internet, and creationists have downloaded it over and over again in hopes of finding a fatal flaw. While they've uncovered a few minor glitches, Ofria says they have yet to find anything serious. We literally have an army of thousands of unpaid bug testers, he says. What more could you want?
A couple of supporting Web sites:
It is impossible for scientists to look before the big bang. It's similar to the singularity of a black hole. We can only study what emerged.
Stephen Hawkings came close to stepping outside this view, In one of his books, he talked about time taking place throughout the universe as if observed from outside the universe. But none of this can be called science as opposed to religion. It is all an attempt to stretch one's mind around concepts that are unknowable, at least to us now.
You must think I'm for creationism and against science. Nothing could be farther from the truth. But I won't allow religion or science to pretend they have figured everything out, when they quite clearly have not.
If you want, get me some cites to scientific discussion of the universe preceding the big bang, and preceding the primordial egg, and explaining how where when and why the primordial egg existed. And when you do find a scientist or two taking a stab at those questions, make sure they provide empirical proof. By definition they can't and most won't try because just prior to the big bang there was no measurable time or space and they cannot devise any method of "looking" to a "time" before that.
This is standard scientific theory I have spent a lifetime reading scientific literature, not creationist literature.
"It's more of a Conference USA idea."
I think "Con USA" would be a better description.
"Most scientists absolutely state that they cannot know anything that preceded the big bang."
Yes, that is what they state. That is very different from stating that there is nothing that preceded the big bang, which is what you said they say.
But never mind.
bttt for later read.
Yes, and I have found it wanting not only in accepted Scientific rigor but also in Truthfulness.
There is a category of Science termed 'Junk Science' that includes such false 'Causes' as Global Warming, DDT, Silicone Breast Implants, etc.
Creationism/ID'ism definitely falls into this category.
Unfortunately, Creationism/ID'ism falls NOT ONLY into the category (garbage can) of Junk Science but also into the much more dangerous category of 'Junk Religion'. This category is typified by such Totalitarians as Jim Jones and his Kool-aid drinkers. More importantly for the Free Republic Website, many ignornant ignoramuses here insist on pushing this crap here at Free Republic and thereby marginalizing the reputation of this site and the Conservative Movement.
I will not allow this to happen.
On evolution, a much smaller subject, I think evolution has occured and science may ultimately find all of its mechanisms. I find it interesting they haven't yet. But the real question is why did life form why does it evolve why is there intelligence, etc. Maybe for a reason or cause beyond randomness.
There are big questions in cosmology and particle physics about the big bang and black holes. For very good reasons, these issues are at the frontiers of the field of physics. However, you seem to be saying that simply because we do not know everything about such things, we therefore must know nothing.
There is A LOT that we DO know about the universe. We know that at one time all the matter in the universe must have been concentrated in the same place. The physics of what exactly happened at that moment are not fully known, but that's half the fun of it.
I have a good buddy working at RHIC on Long Island where they are trying (with some success, depending on who you ask) to recreate a state of matter that the entire universe likely was composed of at some point immediately after the "beginnning". They do NOT know EVERYTHING that happened at that moment, but every day they learn something new. Every day they try to push the boundaries back a little farther. It is true that we don't know what happened before the big bang. But trying to claim that the whole idea is bunk because of that puts you on thin ice.
Scientists DON'T know everything, but we can talk with a great deal of certainty about many things. The strength of the scientific method lies not just in finding evidence for what we do know, but defining limits on what we don't know. The problems you describe are just the sort of thing that we love to sink our teeth into, not examples that question the validity of all previous work done in that field of research.
And just to tweak the scientists a little further, every once in a while their measurements throw them a curve ball, so the very foundations of their theories shake just a bit. Was there a big bang for sure? Are the galaxies moving away from one another at the right speed? Why do some very distant objects not show the correct red shift, when they should be incredibly far away? Etc. even the big bang, the expanding universe, etc. may not be the answers 200 years from now.
So the scientists are awfully presumptuous when they think they have disproven God.
He does look Irish, doesn't he? :-)
'...ignorant ignoramuses???'
Excellent usage of noun and adjective there, doc...you must have studied junk grammar in your school days to come up with that beauty...
There's an easy way to test this statement.
Suppose you have a biological specimen where you already know that the answer to "how did it get that way" is "intelligent design." Is science able to correctly determine the origin of that specimen?
Let's start out with something easy: bacteria and yeast that have been genetically engineered to produce human insulin. The correct answer to "how did it get that way" is clearly "intelligent design."
Now, if application of scientific rules can get the correct answer ("somebody did it"), then the premise of this article (and indeed the whole case against ID) is false.
And if the application of scientific rules cannot get the correct answer, then science needs to be adjusted to reality.
The whole thing boils down to one thing: is "somebody did it" an acceptable scientific hypothesis? The answer in this case is obviously yes. (And standards of proof will still apply, and one can even define the relevant tests.)
Hm. Well, that's cute but ultimately silly. Your post reveals a rather apalling lack of both Scientific Rigor and Truthfulness. You're not making a scientific argument. You're just stomping around and waving your arms.
Let's first look at your epithetical reference: "Creationism/ID." This is a strawman, which improperly conflates a specific religious view, with a valid scientific hypothesis. Not very impressive, except as bluster.
Second, and really damning to your case, you've neatly excluded from scientific scrutiny a very large number of cases where "somebody did it" happens to be the correct explanation. Think of the many instances where genetic engineering has been used in agriculture and medicine, for example.
Are you really saying that it's impossible for science to tell the difference between something that was genetically engineered, and something that just happened to evolve that way?
And if the application of scientific rules cannot get the correct answer, then science needs to be adjusted to reality.
Science can't be adjusted to accomodate impossibilities.
Huh? Why does my argument require such a thing? I have simply presented you a set of organisms for which we know that a particular characteristic was due to intelligent interaction.
The example of insulin genes in bacteria is not relevant; we can detect those because we know what an insulin gene looks like, and we can tell it's in the wrong place.
It is in fact completely relevant, as you have kindly offered us the very test needed in this case to support a hypothesis of "Somebody did it." Thus you've demonstrated the fallacy of saying that a design hypothesis is "unscientific" because it is impossible to test.
Science can't be adjusted to accomodate impossibilities.
Well, since we're obviously not talking about "impossibilities," I'll write that off as an ideological, rather than scientific comment.
The problem is, this happens naturally, by virus/plasmid translocation of genes. A virus will very occasionally incorporate a gene from one organism into its own genome, and then infect another organism; then (rarely again) the gene can be incorporated in the new genome. The combination of several very rare events doesn't happen very often, except in bacteria, and that's why we can study evolution by molecular genetic means. But it does mean that if we find a gene in the 'wrong' place, there is a naturalistic mechanism by which it could have got there.
So yours is not a useful test for ID. Sorry.
Not at all. Creationism/ID truly is the nexus of Junk Religion with Junk Science.
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