Lets keep that in mind when people start talking about conflicting ideas and who should be worried about whom.

All I’m asking is that everybody recognize that we are fighting the good fight, in Kansas, and winning. What is ironic, isn’t the fact we produce 2/3rds of the worlds helium. The ironic thing is that Phil’s wife and her family is from Kansas, and he should know all this…. We were bushwacked by a few idiots, lead by people outside the state, and we defeated them… That’s the ironic thing.

But science is a process and not a static thing, and most scientists are aware of that new things can arise that changes the nature of the known. Some don’t but then we can’t expect every person who shows up on this site to have an understanding of epistemology.

Because there are different kinds of knowns belive it or not. If we argue about what is known in _absolute_ terms, we will never get beyond our own self awarness. In absolute terms nothing can be known beyond that something exists that is capable of experiencing that it knows that it exists.

Zen, some kinds of buddhism (and other so called enlightenment teachings) are atheistic “religions” devoted to exploring this fact experientially, and they are surprisingly compatible with skeptisism. They could humoursly be described as methods of being skeptical towards your own existance.

But in practical terms, that will get us nowhere. If I’m hot, I like some ice tea. The absolute nature of my body temperature, or what the essence of ice tea is, removed from all contexts (I.E in the absolute) is really not something that influences my choice of beverage in any way.

So while in absolute terms I can not know that the ice tea exists at all, to function we must move our point of referense into the world that we experience and from that point of reference lots can be known about the ice tea.

This however does not make the god concept any more logical or change the relationship between science and theistic religion, because faith doesn’t carry across the cognitive chasm between the internal and external any better than an observable fact.

What it does do is make it look ridiculus when a person claims that the bible has absolute validity. (Which by extrapolation would mean that the person knows the bibles essential nature through self-reflecting experience, and therefore must infact _be_ the bible)

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So, while science can not claim absolute knowledge, it can make the claim to have the _best possible_ substantiated knowledge of the natural universe at this particular time. And I can not, even as a holistically inclined skeptic find a reason to doubt that.

I’d love to edit my post above. But Ican’t so I’m justgoing toswear under my breath about it for a while .. Sigh.

BA – please can you find a way of letting us edit these blutzFeed comments posts, please ..

So, yes, its ironic as Phil noted.

To change your image will take time – and a lot of kicking the backsides of the morons who’ve given you this bad rap.

Sounds like the good news is you’ve made a start. Bad news though, is there’s still a way to go.

Hopefully, one day you’ll get to the point where your states name – or your nations won’t instantly conjure up pictures of idiots who believe very silly things.

It may take a while – after all, your country was created by the equivalent of annoying bible-thumpers who were told to sod off by the rest of Europe -and their legacy still shows particularly in regions that are, well, seen as if not actually, less developed, less sophisticated and less cosmopolitian. Still listening to the BA and Sagan and Dawkins and their like is a sign of progress.