AAAAAARRRRRGGHHHH!!! Religious fundamentalism.

Hope you can follow what I’m trying to say anyway.

Para. 4 above should read :

Or in short form ‘Don’t Ask’, “Don’t try and find out’, and ‘You shouldn’t try tounderstand God – just do what HE (read ‘I’) says!”

Or problem is all these religious extremists all claim that they and they _alone_ know What /Who God is & Speaks for Her /Him / it anyone who says otherwise is a heretic who deserves severe punishment .. and you only have their word to take for that.

Personally, I’m not willing to believe in a God who won’t talk to me but will happily converse all day every day with some child-abusing, sexist, bigot down the road instead.

Sorry if that’s too strong but … Arrrgghhh!

1) God is always right &
2) If God doesanything thatseems contradictory etc .. see rule 1

Actually its more like “God moves in mysterious watys” & “Some Things Are NOT Meant for Man (sexist but so are they generally) to Know!”

Or in short form Don’t Ask, don’yt try tofind outr and you should understand God but just do what He (read I) say.

Which can be pretty hard when you compare the Holy commands :
I) Thall Shalt NOT suffer a witch to live!”
with
II) “Thou Shalt NOT kill!”

as another example of Biblical inconsistency…

If you see someone who is a witch you’ve got to kill them but the 10 Commandmants says you can’t so..??!

Sorry to say BA but the Church commits far worse crimes / sins against children than enforcing ignorance and encouraging unquestioning obedience to 2000 year old fables. The words rape and physical assault spring to mind.

As far as worse sins go in general deliberate cruelty to kids and animals is ahead (if that’s the word) on my list of “worsts”

The Church has alot toanswer for -both in terms of evil and good whether one outweighs theother is a hard thng todetermine and depsdns alot on personal subjective judgement.

Personally I _would_ teach ID for maybe five minutes in science class – alongside ‘phlogiston’ as an example of an outmoded non-scientific, so-called “Theory” that isn’t science at all. I’d teach kids why its non-science and plain wrong in breif terms then I’d teach them Carl Sagan’s set of critical thinking rules from “The Demon-Haunted World”.

So God knew we would need a savior from the beginning, that is why he wiped out the Earth and all humans but Noah and his direct family. Wait, why didn’t he send Jesus sooner? Those sinners could have used a savior instead of annihilation.

You’re force fitting the answers to meet your preception.

1) God is always right.
2) If God ever does anything that doesn’t make sense or seems like it might be wrong or counterproductive… see rule 1.

God intended for them to have knowledge of good and evil, so he created them without it? Then he put a tree in the garden and told them, “Don’t eat of that tree,” because he expected them to eat of it? And that was so he would be justified in punishing them for disobedience, when they had no understanding of the concept of disobedience because they didn’t know right and wrong? That’s called a plan? And God is still considered moral and good?

Also they would have lived indefinatly in the garden with out ever experiencing death so they had to be removed from the garden for death to be able to eventually claim them,

Couple of problems with that. The biggest is that the Garden contained a second Tree, the Tree of Eternal Life. They were kicked out of the Garden so they wouldn’t Eat of that tree. But wait, they didn’t have death before getting kicked out of the Garden? There’s some serious story inconsistency.

Cal it rationalization or setup or whatever you want it is what happened.

Or, it is a story, made up to bond a community and serve a different purpose than describe factual events.

But this is supposed to be about ID.

God says, “The day you eat from the Tree of Knowledge is the Day you will die.” Yet Adam and Eve ate of the Tree of Knowledge and lived many long years afterward. Ergo, God lied.

As far as “spiritual death” and continually being in God’s presence in the Garden of Eden, what does that even mean? God kicked them out of the Garden, yes. He kicked us all out of the Garden for the mistakes of our ancestors. Not very fair, holding us guilty for their actions. But equating that with death is pretty far-fetched. As for continually being with God, then why did God have to come looking for them? If they were with him continually, he watched the events unfold. Now maybe he didn’t want to intervene so they could display their free will, and maybe he quizzed them as some rhetorical device so they would admit their errors, but that interpretation sure doesn’t fit the direct reading of the text. The direct reading of the text does not support that they were “continually with God”, or “spiritual death”.

And that doesn’t even begin to address the morality of threatening Adam and Eve with death for disobedience, when they didn’t yet have a knowledge of Good and Evil, so were unable to understand the concept of disobediance.

Mind you I’m not advocating the notion myself- as with the aliens from ‘The Abyss’- its ‘just a suggestion’.

Jess Tauber

There are documented cases of scientists loudly poo-pooing a new idea and getting nasty about it, only to later be shown wrong. Wegener and Plate Tectonics comes to mind. Another is the “Clovis First” theory on the populating of North America. As I said, in reality science is carried out by humans, with all their human foibles intact. Fortunately, the system of publishing and peer review is set up to accommodate those foibles.

The “environmental crisis” has proved to be a great boon to researchers who now how to game the system. A friend of mine is a senior aero engineer at NASA-Dryden. They wanted to do some studies on what it would take to fly an airplane on Mars where the pressure is about 10 mBar and the temperature about -100°C. This was during the Clinton administration when NASA was supposed to be conducting a “Mission to Planet Earth.” So, rather than asking for money for some vague future mission to Mars, they instead said that they were developing an autonomous aircraft to study the depletion of the ozone layer over Antarctica where the pressure is about 10 mBar and the temperature about -100°C.

They got the money.

Using the research, Aurora Flight Systems in Virgina built some gliding prototypes that flew successfully:

http://www.aurora.aero/science/MarsFlyer.html

There used to be a really cool video from the on-board camera showing the wings and boom unfolding after being dropped from the balloon at 110,000 feet (34 Km), but it seems to be gone.

- Jack

This is one of the arenas (that Irishman mentioned) where personalities have overridden rational analysis.

It has finally migrated to Canada. In the past week, a researcher in Quebec was denied a grant to study the detrimental effects of intelligent design “theory” on the population (that’s simplifying the study subject a bit, but it was the essential premise). Apparently, when they denied him, they said that he didn’t justify the need for such a study and that people SHOULD be taught competing theories to evolution since evolution has so many flaws.

Lovely. Just lovely.

I guess stupidity is subject to the principles of osmosis as well, since borders are semi-permeable.

In an ideal case, that is what would happen, and what does happen. In reality, scientists are humans, and become attached to their ideas and hypotheses, which can blind them to the flaws in their data just as much as anyone can become blind to evidence that disagrees with them. Also, being people, personalities come into play, and someone can achieve a personal grudge over professional review. Part of the practice of science is not only peer review, but anonymous peer review. The potential publisher submits it to reviewers that the author is not aware of who they are. This allows the reviewers to be critical without fear of repercussions (which can happen, for instance, if the reviewer is a post-doc student and the author is a well-known and highly published researcher). The balance is that since the reviewers can be candid, they can also be unfair (sometimes). Of course, then it falls upon the publisher to combine the responses from all reviewers and filter out the meaningful from meaningless. Also, the author is given the feedback and allowed (required) to alter the article to meet the standards that the publisher demands. In practice, it’s the most fair way developed for allowing critics to be open and honest without fear of reprisal while restraining critique to the work and not the personalities involved. It isn’t perfect, but then nothing is perfect.

>I just don’t see these Id “scientists” doing this.

Here’s a predicament. No, the ID scientists aren’t doing research and publishing their results through peer review. They are publishing their results through popular media.

However there is a trick they haven’t quite picked up, but pseudoscientists have. Peer review each other’s work and publish in your own journals. The problem with that is that the folks reviewing aren’t reviewing critically – they aren’t using the established methods of checking for testing flaws, analysis flaws and poor logic, abuse of the data, etc. This is a problem because they can claim “peer review”, and scientists are left arguing “That’s not real peer review.” That may be a true statement, but it sure sounds like sour grapes, especially to the uninformed.

I think it’s a problem for our side that we keep harping and emphasizing “peer review” without qualifying what makes adequate peer review. It’s not enough to have someone that agrees with you read your work.