Posted on 06/23/2007 11:45:35 PM PDT by MatthewTan
Gravity is obviously directly observable. I can “observe” it by feeling the pressure of my chair on my butt as I type. Perhaps you can feel the same pressure. If you are not already sitting, sit down and you will feel it. I promise.
The fact that a long time ago we did not have a math model or even a name for gravity it is completely and utterly irrelevant to the question of whether it is observable.
As for using drugs, quite taking a common figure of speech so seriously.
I’m just imagining the day some school board replaces science and math (and spelling) with the RussP curriculum.
Today, children, we are going to learn about gravity. Please sit on your butts until you feel the Force.
Of course Newton did not sit on his butt, or have his head planted firmly in it. He was not so much interested in the pressure on his butt as he was linking this phenomenon with the behavior of planets. From moons to moons, so to speak.
Oh, sure. Natural forces, but hardly blind. Organic.
“The task of science is not simply to say, gee whiz, that looks designed. Science wants to know how it got that way.”
I agree that science “wants to know how it got that way,” but I don’t agree that they should simply reject ID until they know that.
According to your reasoning, forensic scientists cannot conclude that a murder was committed until they know how it was committed and/or who committed it. I’ll bet they would be very surprised to learn that!
According to your reasoning, SETI can never declare a signal from space to be the result of an intelligent source until they know specifically who and where the source is.
Your reasoning is typical of the nonsense that evolutionists constantly espouse. I’m here to refute it this time, but will someone like me be available to refute it the next time you espouse it?
I’m just imagining the day some school board replaces science and math (and spelling) with the RussP curriculum.
Today, children, we are going to learn about gravity. Please sit on your butts until you feel the Force.
Of course Newton did not sit on his butt, or have his head planted firmly in it. He was not so much interested in the pressure on his butt as he was linking this phenomenon with the behavior of planets. From moons to moons, so to speak.
ROTFLMAO
How can you conclude that a death was murder without discussing how it happened? Murder implies more than a death and more than the physical act that caused death. It implies another person and a specific class of motive. Murder cannot be committed by a pet cat, even if the cat was the immediate cause of death.
ID rather scrupulously avoids the questions that a detective asks if murder is suspected. ID fails to ask when the act of design occurred, when it was implemented; it fails to ask what the motives, capabilities and limitations of the designer might be. In other words, it simply stops asking questions.
SETI is equivalent to archaeology. Archaeologists have many samples of objects known to have been created by humans, but not known to have been created by natural processes. There are borderline cases that are controversial.
SETI looks for a narrow-band radio signal, something known to have been produced by human civilization, but never observed in nature. That is all SETI is. If such a signal is ever observed, and it is determined not to be something created by humans or natural processes, then there will be controversy and further research. Something a bit like that has already happened. Further research has always found natural causes.
The phenomena that shape populations are literally and figuratively blind, else species would not go extinct.
Evolution copes with environmental change by spreading investments around. This is often successful, but most of the species that have existed are extinct.
When a species is done, it’s done. Nothing to do with blind evolution.
And the earth is flat.
Let's back up a bit. I've seen quite a few of your posts, but never quite figured out your point of view.
Do you accept any version or degree of common descent?
Even Columbus knew the earth is not flat. They didn’t know if it is a sphere and Columbus returned very unsure. It could be a knotted toroid for all he knew.
quote:
ID rather scrupulously avoids the questions that a detective asks if murder is suspected. ID fails to ask when the act of design occurred, when it was implemented; it fails to ask what the motives, capabilities and limitations of the designer might be. In other words, it simply stops asking questions.
my reply:
Funny, that’s what evolution often does too:
“Much of present-day biological knowledge is ideological. A key symptom of ideological thinking is the explanation that has no implications and cannot be tested. I call such logical dead ends antitheories because they have exactly the opposite effect of real theories: they stop thinking rather than stimulate it. Evolution by natural selection, for instance, which Charles Darwin originally conceived as a great theory, has lately come to function more as an antitheory, called upon to cover up embarrassing experimental shortcomings and legitimize findings that are at best questionable and at worst not even wrong. Your protein defies the laws of mass action? Evolution did it! Your complicated mess of chemical reactions turns into a chicken? Evolution! The human brain works on logical principles no computer can emulate? Evolution is the cause!” —Robert B. Laughlin, Nobel-laureate physicist
On your other point, SETI is perfectly willing to declare a signal to be evidence of intelligence life in space even if they never determine who, what, or where that source is. According to your reasoning about ID, that would not be scientific.
By the way, I once read an article by someone from SETI who took issue with ID advocates using SETI to make this point. The SETI person went into a discussion about what they are looking for to determine if a signal came from an intelligent source. He completely missed the point. The question of *how* you determine if the source was intelligent is beside the point here. The point is that you can determine (at least with a specified degree of probability) *whether* a signal required intelligence. And you can do it without knowing anything about the source itself.
That is quite the opposite of what I said. If a signal is discovered that has characteristics of man-made signals, that will be the start of the investigation, not the end. The point of SETI is that there is a class of signals known to be made by humans, but never observed from a non-human source. No one argues that such a signal automatically indicates an alien civilization.
I will take your quote from the physicist at face value. I accept the fact that there is much bad science writing.
But accepting this characterture of science writing as equivalent to what researchers do is a bit like accepting what the New York Times says about conservatism.
quote:
That is quite the opposite of what I said. If a signal is discovered that has characteristics of man-made signals, that will be the start of the investigation, not the end. The point of SETI is that there is a class of signals known to be made by humans, but never observed from a non-human source. No one argues that such a signal automatically indicates an alien civilization.
my reply:
My point is that SETI will not require the source of the signal to be identified before they declare it to be an intelligent source. Think about it.
quote:
I will take your quote from the physicist at face value. I accept the fact that there is much bad science writing.
reply:
Indeed there is. And knee-jerk evolutionists are the source of a disproportionately large amount of it.
You left of the part about the looked for signal being equivalent to signals from known sources. This is where ID departs from SETI and departs from science.
SETI does not look for signals having "interesting" characteristics. It looks for signals of a type whose origin is known. It is the same as digging for clay pots and arrowheads.
As for knee jerk evolutionists, it is customary for scientists writing about planets, for example, to assume that the behavior of gravity has not changed significantly since Newton and Einstein. One can write about space without starting from Galileo and arguing the entire case for heliocentrism.
Similarly, after 150 years, it is customary to assume common descent and research details. Not even Behe is going to question common descent or the general outline of variation and selection.
But if you read actual science instead of AIG, you will find concerns similar to your quote from the physicist. You can even find such admonitions in the writings of Dawkins.
quote:
You left of the part about the looked for signal being equivalent to signals from known sources. This is where ID departs from SETI and departs from science.
SETI does not look for signals having “interesting” characteristics. It looks for signals of a type whose origin is known. It is the same as digging for clay pots and arrowheads.
my reply:
Just like the SETI guy, you are still missing the point. I don’t care what SETI is “looking for.” The point is that they are attempting to infer design without having any information whatsoever about the *designer* (unless the message happened to contain such information, and SETI could decode it).
By the way, do you suppose that what SETI is “looking for,” and what they would consider proof of intelligence, are the same thing? Suppose they received a message that continuously repeated the first million binary digits of pi. Is that what they are “looking for”? No. But do you suppose it would prove intelligent life in space? I’ll bet they would say it does!
I have seen people seriously propose looking for a coded message in DNA. If you can think of an algorithm for finding such a message, go for it. Interestingly, there are people who suggest we engineer such a message and place in a bacterium.
Perhaps that would be like scraping a parchment for reuse.
At any rate, you haven't got the picture on SETI. You confuse people's motives -- searching for extraterrestrial intelligence -- with their methods.
The methods are well established, and equivalent to archaeology. If the ID movement came up with a comparable method, it could do scientific research. So far, all we have is 200 years of folks like the the Discovery Institute lamenting that they haven't done any research.
Award-Winning Post!
But what award? *rummages in closet* How about a “Best Coloring!” award from 2nd grade?
That's just not true. Gravity is the attractive force that all objects of mass exert upon one another. Until Isaac Newton just 350 years ago, nobody intuited that gravity existed.
Other people had other explanations for why objects tended to fall to earth, but they weren't gravity. As I said above, Aristotle said that Natural Law, rather than gravity (or what we'd label gravity) was responsible and that was the prevailing view in Europe and the Middle East for 2000 years.
Remember that observing the effects of gravity is not the same as observing gravity -- you can't see gravity, you can just see a few of its more prominent effects.
The fact that a long time ago we did not have a math model or even a name for gravity it is completely and utterly irrelevant
I'm not talking about math or names. 400 years ago, nobody knew that objects of mass have an attractive force. If they didn't know that, they didn't know about gravity.
As for using drugs, quite taking a common figure of speech so seriously.
Where you're from its considered polite to accuse people of consuming illegal drugs? That's interesting. It isn't where I live.
You can't accept the fact that the distribution of oils in the bread combined with the uneven heat of the pan caused a "design" on the bread that resembles the virgin Mary??
Guess you think all of those "micky mouse" designs in the clouds were put there.
There is a rock near my house with a "face on it"...guess it must have been designed
Creationist - step away from that logic and put your hands up...you're going to put your eye out with it....
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