The left's anti-science: The culture of speculation, Global Warming and Evolution

The stakes are higher than most conservatives realize. When the fraud of man-made global warming finally dies, folks will start thinking: What else were we lied to about? How could the high priests of modern knowledge have confidently insisted something that was never remotely plausible?

A key element of progressivism is having wise philosopher-kings who make benevolent decisions for the masses. It is a core element of conservatism that you can make decisions for yourself. But for progressives, it is essential to convince the public that the designated authorities know better than you do, including what to eat, how to raise your kids, how to educate children, whom to vote for, etc.

Who will control society is up for grabs. The entire progressive religion depends upon maintaining public belief that their self-declared experts are all-knowing. Conformity is more important than truth. So desperate Warmists are intensifying their efforts even as their argument collapses in full view of everyone.

But a scientist with an opinion is not a scientist. A real scientist is cheerfully open to being proven wrong, eager for discovery more than for satisfying his ego. Many of the most important discoveries were not what a researcher was expecting. A scientist will have suspicions and a working hypothesis, but only with an open mind.

Instead, modern science has become a festival of speculation. Progressives simply speculate about what might be true and then read tea leaves for any hint consistent with their imagination.

We have special-effects television shows about dinosaurs showing the coloring of dinosaurs whose skin we have never seen and the sounds they make which we have never heard. Science shows tell us that the mother dinosaur is starting to worry that day about the storm approaching, and that the young dinosaurs are feeling playful.

neo-Darwinism is fundamentally dumb luck (random mutations)

The fundamental "engine" of evolution is (a) unproven and (b) impossible.

Dumb luck cannot create either (1) different but equal species, (2) better species (whatever criteria you assign to "better") or (3) more complex / more advanced species involving increased and continually increasing levels of information (complexity).

The #1 fundamental reason why evolutionary "dumb luck" cannot create an equal or better species is because the complexity of biology is VASTLY -- GIGANTICALLY -- MORE COMPLEX than what evolutionists are imagining.

The leap from one tiny change to the next is HUGE, not the minor little baby step imagined.

And the massive complexity of biologic organisms means that a change to a VIABLE alternative is mind-bogglingly daunting.

There are so many hundreds if not thousands of ways that even a single cell organism can go wrong, that dumb luck is fundamentally impossible as an engine for species change.

If any one of tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of activities are not all SIMULTANEOUSLY operating properly, the cell dies.

Change ONE of those tens or hundreds of thousands of functions -- just one -- and the cell or animal dies.

And then the only way "dumb luck" can work is when it is NOT dumb luck at all, but us reading the END of the story and superimposing hindsight on to what we imagine to be dumb luck.

"Life began only once." That's an assumption.

Well, that's true. But what I was trying to say is that we cannot observe, much less test, the creation of life. The origin of life is in the past.

Life is not originating NOW, in the present tense.

As a result, we cannot observe the creation or origin of life and we cannot test or experiment on the creation of life.

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There is no reason in principle that scientists couldn't test hypothesis for the origin of life in a lab.

That's not correct.

And this again highlights confusion over what you mean by evolution.

You could test the hypothesis: Researchers can create life in the laboratory, true or false? Or more accurately state the NULL hypothesis: Researchers cannot create life in the laboratory, and then try to prove the null hypothesis false.

But that is not the question with evolution.

The question of evolution is where did we come from? How did we get here?

First, if scientists created life in the laboratory, they would be using the fore-knowledge of how life operates by "reverse engineering" and copying from existing, natural life. So they would be "cheating" in effect.

That is, they would be imposing INTELLIGENT DESIGN upon their efforts. They would be using what we know about life to GUIDE the re-creation of life.

But the first time around, there would be no benefit of any intelligent design to guide the process. So it is not the same thing at all.

Second, all the researchers would be demonstrating is that researchers can create life in the laboratory... NOT how did life actually begin on Earth.

Again, the problem is DEFINING what the question is. IF the question is what happened the first time, as I insist it is, you cannot test that without a time machine.

Moseley,

I must say that you are an A**h** in the eyes of your combatants.

But my hero, for fighting the good fight against willful ignorance.

Good fight, being defined as one that seeks the truth, regardless of where it leads.

I find it ironic that the reductionist, the materialists have gone “meta” in virtually all there “scientific” conclusions.

Tell me about the “Dark invocations”

Those of matter and energy,

Dark, driven slow like some new language

The unknown necessity for the certainty of uncertainty.

Out here, there no stars,

Out here, we are lost without “reason”.

The fact that the models explaining the motions of the planets and even the moon and the apparent motion of the sun DID NOT accurately predict their motion is what drove countless, painstaking observations and attempts to develop new explanations.

That's incorrect. The Ptolemaic model did a very good job on the motions of the objects they could see, including the planets, moon, and sun. From lecture notes from an Ohio State Astronomy course:

EVALUATION OF THE PTOLEMAIC MODEL
Strengths:
Explains many complex behaviors with a few basic tricks.
Gives very accurate predictions of planetary positions. Still pretty good 1500 years later.
...
THE COPERNICAN MODEL
Motivations:
A conservative revolutionary, Copernicus holds strongly to idea of uniform circular motions in the heavens.
Rejects Ptolemaic model because it fiddles with this assumption ("equants") --- not Aristotelian enough!
Motivated by "philosophical" considerations of elegance, not by failure of Ptolemy's model to match data.

> But at some point, we agree that one of the possible answers appears to be pretty much correct, so we "accept" it as accurate and move on from there
That is pre-scientific superstition.

So you don't believe that science should ever accept a question as "resolved," at least provisionally, so things can move on? Instead, we should just keep asking the same questions over and over, even though we keep getting the same answers? Again, I'm glad real scientists don't feel constrained by your silly rules.

Germs are not a theory, because we can look at them and watch them do their thing.

Hoo boy. The existence of germs is not a theory. We knew about them long before germ theory. The idea that germs multiplying in the body is what makes us sick is a theory, however: that's why it's called Germ Theory. From the London Science Museum:

Germ theory states that many diseases are caused by the presence and actions of specific micro-organisms within the body. The theory was developed and gained gradualacceptance in Europe and the United States from the middle 1800s. It eventually superseded existing miasma and contagion theories of disease and in so doing radically changed the practice of medicine. It remains a guiding theory that underlies contemporary biomedicine.

[Note also use of the word "acceptance." Is "accepting" germ theory also non-scientific?]

I really think you need to brush up on your understanding of laws, theories, and observations before you go lecturing other people about not knowing science.

"Well, that's true. But what I was trying to say is that we cannot observe, much less test, the creation of life. The origin of life is in the past."

So your contention is that science is restricted to only studying phenomena that are happing right now. Oh boy. There goes Geology, Cosmology, Archeology, and a lot of other entire fields of study.

I'm sorry, but you don't know what you are talking about. There is no such restriction in science. We can study the effects of something regardless of when it occured. We can run experiments to recreate conditions and circumstances to see how they come out. We can try to replicate consequences.

The scientific demand that experiments be replicatable is real, but it applies to experiments. Not to the subject being studied. You are confused.

"And this again highlights confusion over what you mean by evolution."

This was already covered. Your confusion is what you mean by evolution. As I said, you have it wrong. Evolution and Biogenesis are two different things.

You may be a good lawyer but science is not your thing. Leave writing about it to other people.

Let me ask if either of you have an issue with any of these quotes from ‘science’:

Darwin showed that material causes are a sufficient explanation not only for physical phenomena, as Descartes and Newton had shown, but also for biological phenomena with all their seeming evidence of design and purpose. By coupling undirected, purposeless variation to the blind, uncaring process of natural selection, Darwin made theological or spiritual explanations of the life processes superfluous. Together with Marx's materialistic theory of history and society and Freud's attribution of human behavior to influences over which we have little control, Darwin's theory of evolution was a crucial plank in the platform of mechanism and materialism…
-Douglas Futuyma's Evolutionary Biology (1998, 3rd Ed., Sinauer Associates), p. 5

________

“Our brains are shaped for fitness, not for truth; sometimes the truth is adaptive, sometimes it is not.”
- Steven Pinker, evolutionary cognitive psychologist, How the Mind Works (W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 305.

________

The time has come to take seriously the fact that we humans are modified monkeys, not the favored Creation of a Benevolent God on the Sixth Day. In particular, we must recognize our biological past in trying to understand our interactions with others. We must think again especially about our so-called “ethical principles.” The question is not whether biology—specifically, our evolution—is connected with ethics, but how. As evolutionists, we see that no [ethical] justification of the traditional kind is possible.
Morality, or more strictly our belief in morality, is merely an adaptation put in place to further our reproductive ends. Hence the basis of ethics does not lie in God’s will…. In an important sense, ethics as we understand it is an illusion fobbed off on us by our genes to get us to cooperate. It is without external grounding. Like Macbeth’s dagger, it serves a powerful purpose without existing in substance.
Ethics is illusory inasmuch as it persuades us that it has an objective reference. This is the crux of the biological position. Once it is grasped, everything falls into place.
- Michael Ruse and E. O. Wilson, The Evolution of Ethics

________

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won’t find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. 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.
- Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life

________

Naturalistic evolution has clear consequences that Charles Darwin understood perfectly.
1) No gods worth having exist.
2) No life after death exists.
3) No ultimate foundation for ethics exists.
4) No ultimate meaning in life exists.
5) Human free will is nonexistent.
- William Provine (from Darwin Day speech)

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Why is this important? The US Constitution assumed all human rights were bestowed to us by our Creator through Natural Law . A Humanistic belief (now based on Darwinism) would assume rights and morality are bestowed to us by ‘mankind’ based on circumstance. Morality, according to Darwinism, is but an illusion.

Americas leaders of 1787 had studied Cicero, Polybius, Coke, Locke, Montesquieu, and Blackstone, among others, as well as the history of the rise and fall of governments, and they recognized these underlying principles of law as those of the Decalogue, the Golden Rule, and the deepest thought of the ages.

William Blackstone, whose writings trained American's lawyers for its first century, capsulized such reasoning:

"For as God, when he created matter, and endued it with a principle of mobility, established certain rules for the...direction of that motion; so, when he created man, and endued him with freewill to conduct himself in all parts of life, he laid down certain immutable laws of human nature, whereby that freewill is in some degree regulated and restrained, and gave him also the faculty of reason to discover the purport of those laws."

What are those natural laws? Blackstone continued:

"Such among others are these principles: that we should live honestly, should hurt nobody, and should render to every one his due.."

The Founders saw these as moral duties between individuals. Thomas Jefferson wrote:

"Man has been subjected by his Creator to the moral law, of which his feelings, or conscience as it is sometimes called, are the evidence with which his Creator has furnished him .... The moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature, accompany them into a state of society . their Maker not having released them from those duties on their forming themselves into a nation."

A wise man once observed that while belief in God after the Holocaust may be difficult, belief in man after the Holocaust is impossible.

So your contention is that science is restricted to only studying phenomena that are happing right now.

Science can only draw reliable conclusions about what is happening right now, because there is no other way to follow the Scientific Method. The only way to perform repeated experiments is with phenomenon that we can observe in the present.

In fact, the concept of studying something other than in the present is absurd. You can only look at what exists now. Unless you have a time machine, you cannot observe anything other than the present.

Oh boy. There goes Geology, Cosmology, Archeology, and a lot of other entire fields of study.

No, not at all. Geology is the study of what is in the ground. You cannot leap to conclusions about what happened in the past. You can study what is there know.

Your wish that you could know the past does not mean you can know it.

But as I said before, we can see the tectonic plates moving NOW. That is not the past. We can see magma flows happening NOW.

Same with cosmology. There are many things we can observe now.

However, the rest is pure bulls**t.

You can fantasize all sorts of things. But you are indulging in pure fantasy.

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