all of creation testifies to the existence of god. open your eyes and your hearts. repent for the end is near. proclaim JESUS as lord and surrender to god so that you may find mercy.

He visto que muchos sitios antes y la mayor

They will go on to read up on everything to do with his birth sign

. The term is used colloquially for any kind of Linkback. As a result, TrackBack spam filters similar to those implemented against comment

This is similar to comment spam but avoids some of the safeguards designed to stop the latter practice. This enables authors to keep

It sounds interesting but I am not sure that I agree with you completely.

I present to you one Rob Hood, commentator on The Conservative Voice. He has written a remarkably logic-free screed saying that the Mars Phoenix Lander is a waste of taxpayer’s money. Why?

A rational voice in the cacophony created by fundamentalists and atheists railing, ad nauseam, against each other.

Actually atheists reject all religion. Fundamentalism is usually attacked by liberals.

If there is a God; if there was an intellegent, purposeful, creative entity that planned and initiated the Universe, do either science or religion represent it?

And now you jumped from atheism to science. Why do you conflate these two disparate areas?

@ henry darger:

so what did the e coli turn into? a frog? a bird? what? or was it just another tired example of socalled micro evolution that we continue to hear about?

It turned into a bacteria that used another feeding media, i.e. inhabited another ecological niche, and would be identified as a new species of bacteria according to the ecological species definition. (As bacterias don’t usually reproduce sexually, the sexually based usual specie definition doesn’t fit. No matter, all 26 or so different species concept are all man made idealizations pressed upon the existing populations.)

“Micro evolution” is something we hear from creationists. I dunno why you started to rant on this, but only crackpots deny basic biology. And this is a science blog.

Next you will demand evidence for the observable fact of evolution.

Well, google it, the science is nearly as accessible these days as it is for the scientists who publish it. The basic evidence for evolution is that common descent, or heritable changes over generations, will lead to nested hierarchies of traits – including your magic species.

All species are observed to be ordered thus, by phylogenetic trees, which they wouldn’t be if they didn’t result from the observed process. As Talk Origins notes, the probability that a typical phylogenetic relationship would occur by chance is 10^-30 or lower, so this is a fantastically hard test of a prediction.

That is way harder than the usual standard for theories, where 1 % uncertainty is considered as upper limit. It is not just establishing evidence beyond any reasonable doubt, it is worth 10^28 such. And there are many such trees.

@ everett:

While the author stated flatly that, “evolution is fact”, unless he (and every other person who thinks that evolution is the “only” explanation to life on earth today) has serious answers to some of these questions

Those are made up questions that has nothing to do with that biologists, or other scientists, flatly states that evolution is a fact. See phylogenetic trees above.

This is a matter of survival.

We must ensure that Human, not Arachnid, controls the galaxy!

Sad isn’t it. I think I’d sidestep the whole conversation myself by raising the point that as $Diety’s creations, our population is expanding at an exponential rate.

Even leaving aside issues with Western Capitalism we’re going to run out of resources sometime fairly soon simply because there’ll be too many of us for this planet to support.

Roll on space exploration for the purpose of finding new resources, and understanding how we might support human life on new planets… Surely $Diety wouldn’t be against that?

Cheers,

Alex/

If there is a god, and I believe there is, (bad start huh!) then, with that assumption, I should be antithetical to science, evolution, in fact almost all serious science.

My career was as a science teacher–huh? Yup, and the worst kind, Earth Science. You know 100 million year strata of rocks with flourishing biological specimens etc. One point five billion year old rocks with evidence of rudimentary life. Galaxies billions of years old based on Red Shift and oh so far away–that one is likely to get revised. I’m speculating here. Astronomy and Geology–both avenues that apparently, to many, have overthrown religious faith.

There is, to many, an apparently unbridgeable gap between my faith and my science.

No, that isn’t accurate or adequate. I just don’t know how they fit together yet. It probably won’t happen in my lifetime, I’m 63. However, there is emerging mathematical speculation that there could have been something on the far side of “The Big Bang”. If the theory gets more mathematical or observational support a lot of folks are in for a change of tune. I really don’t know which side of their mouth they’ll be whistling from, but they will have to revise the tune.

I point that out, along with string theory, and a lot of other unresolved math, science, speculation, and observation about the cosmos; geology, quantum mechanics, biology, and anti-matter that we just don’t know how it all fits in to what we think we do know. For instance, where are the intermediate forms of life. You know the little forms of life, with no nucleus that changed(?) into nucleated forms. The little horses with feet that changed into all of the variety of horse-like creatures we have today–all with hooves that are essentially the same construction. Tough question if one takes it seriously.

And how about dinosaurs that became birds. Oh, and mammals that went back to sea. Science has a lot to answer for–especially evolutionary science.

While the author stated flatly that, “evolution is fact”, unless he (and every other person who thinks that evolution is the “only” explanation to life on earth today) has serious answers to some of these questions he is stuck with the uncomfortable situation that I may have a more robust explanation for the relationship between faith and scientific inquiry than do they.

There has to be a lot of faith on both sides of the issue–yes, I believe that evolutionary science is bounded by faith! Faith in natural processes only, and no I don’t know how to resolve the implication of their faith questions any more than I know the answers to my own faith questions. I have already answered that there isn’t enough evidence.

People who claim to speak for God and say that teaching evolution is from “The devil”, are on ice too thin to support them. Evolution predicts actual events too often to throw it out or teach “Intelligent Design” as a parallel. Religion, under any guise, doesn’t belong in American public schools. Of course there will be impassioned, perhaps hateful reaction to that statement if it gets around to some others of faith.

Evolution also has great holes, some I have mentioned above.

What is sustainable, at the end of the day is: Science and Religion are complimentary. Each speaks to an apparently different part of the human condition. Since we cannot resolve them at present doesn’t mean that there isn’t a solution. It means we haven’t yet understood what the resolution looks like.

We’ve come a long way since we viewed the cosmos and the the earth in the way that Aristotle did. We had Copernicus, we had Newton, we had Einstein, and There isn’t any reason to guess that we’ve found the final answers just now and that we can use the present state of science to overthrow religion, or religion to overthrow science either.

Sincerely,

Weatherguy

“I sometimes wonder just how messed up some people’s logic can be.

The answer, in many cases, is none.”

Henry, I think you don’t realize what science is. Science is all about “possible explanations,” or, more accurately, “the most likely naturalistic explanation given the available evidence.” It is indeed possible that God created the universe last Thursday, or that all matter constituted itself spontaneously into being via quantum effects, oh, let’s call it fifty thousand years ago. Neither one of those possible explanations are the most likely given the evidence.

Now, individual points:

> wow. contradict yourself much? first they have loads of proof that they don’t exist, then by definition they cannot disprove their existence.

I can see how you’d read that, but I would suggest that while science can disprove some kinds of gods, it cannot disprove the concept of a general demiurge. Scientific evidence tends to point across a god that has sex with women and fathers all sorts of weird hybrid critters like minotaurs and Helen of Troy, no? Therefore, either Zeus does not exist or Zeus is much more boring nowadays.

> and, that’s basically nothing more than a possible explaination. the flat earth used to be a “currently accepted model that seemed to fit observations as currently understood”. I wonder what ever happened to that?

When it was no longer sufficient to explain observed phenomena, it was discarded. Much like Spinoza’s spontaneous generation of maggots from meal.

> so what did the e coli turn into? a frog? a bird? what? or was it just another tired example of socalled micro evolution that we continue to hear about?

Indicative of a basic misunderstanding of evolution, I see. Just like maggots don’t come from meal, frogs don’t come from bacteria. Since you asked, it developed the ability to digest citrate, something that E. coli can not do. I guess a sufficient macrorganic analogy would be to imagine a new cat breed with a ruminant’s stomach so it can eat grass.

> thats the problem. man-induced results in a lab are hardly proof of evolution. we would really need to see it occur in nature.

Evolution is evolution. As no direct genetic tinkering was performed, only environmental factors come into play. Evolution is about adaptation to the environment to the nth degree; unless of course you’re honestly suggesting environmental factors really have no effect on adaptation…?

> they most certainly did. until Pasteur came along. Now, it seems, they’re back at it. only now they call it abiogenesis.

Same misunderstanding. Abiogenesis has nothing to do with ‘cells from nothing’ and everything to do with transitionary stages from random gunk to simple self-replicators to less complex cells to more complex cells. Think about it this way: erosion does not carve complex shapes all in one go, does it? It is a long, iterative process. Same thing.

> they like to say that because they need to believe it in order to be right. this is clearly illustrated by the level of ignorance about the particular religion represented here as well as a total lack of knowledge about the author of the article or myself. they see a target and they swarm it. all they need to know is that the target doesn’t think the way they do. that’s enough to warrant ridicule.

I’m rather… good with Christian theology. I easily hold my own in debates with preachers and potentates up to the bishop level. I can’t speak for anyone else here, although I can’t and won’t deny that some atheists (of which I am not one) do seem to support their stance more with ideological emotional fervor than the rationality they claim.

However, even considering the Bible the inerrant Word of God there is no mention of life either being created or not created on other planets. It is, quite literally, unmentioned. To therefore assume that there is no life based on the text of the Bible, as the author did, is extremely bad theology especially if he is a Fundamentalist.

> give me some credit.

You have been credited tree-fiddy in the First Scolopendran Bank.

well. sure. lots of things in our lives are also by their nature unscientific.
what’s your point?

“Science has loads of proof that intercessory Gods of the water-to-wine variety, or the literally-made-the-universe-in-six-days variety, do not exist. Meanwhile, science by definition cannot disprove a being whose existence is by definition supernatural.”

wow. contradict yourself much? first they have loads of proof that they don’t exist, then by definition they cannot disprove their existence.

please do share some of this “loads of proof”.

“Science can’t disprove the existence of, say, spirits, but it can prove that spirits are not necessary to adequately explain why creepy old houses creak in the night.”

ok. that provides a possible explaination. but that’s all. religion itself also provides a possible explaination. how about we stay away from the ridiculous examples of creaking houses and get on with what proof we have of life emerging from non-life. proof mind you. not possible explainations. without proof you are going on faith that what you believe is true, no matter how you came up with the idea.

“Except for the fact that the currently accepted model seems to fit observations as currently understood better than previous ones…”

and, that’s basically nothing more than a possible explaination. the flat earth used to be a “currently accepted model that seemed to fit observations as currently understood”. I wonder what ever happened to that?

self replicating prions?
“A prion is a nonliving, self-replicating infectious agent made of protein. It can reproduce with the aid of its host’s biological machinery, like a virus. “Prion” is short for “proteinaceous infectious particle.” http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-prion.htm

“Sweet Fanged God. It’s been honestly and openly observed in E. coli in a lab now.

so what did the e coli turn into? a frog? a bird? what? or was it just another tired example of socalled micro evolution that we continue to hear about?

“More than adaptation, we’re talking does-not-occur-in-nature-hey-that’s-new evilution.”

thats the problem. man-induced results in a lab are hardly proof of evolution. we would really need to see it occur in nature.

“Then there’s the fossil record,”

its just as possible that any two compared sets of bones were simply two different species to begin with. since we’re allowing possible explainations.

“demographic trends of populations showing physical adaptation to environmental stimuli, the fact that evolution fits the observational data much, much better than anything that came before…”

again, not really what the idea of true evolution is all about. just what they trot out to show as some sort of proof when they really have none. they say “if this can happen in x time, then y can happen in 10,000,000x time.” and yet it hasn’t been *proven*.

“An honest scientist will say that the model will always adapt to better fit observational data, but it must always include what made previous models right. Here’s a simple example:”

woo. like those australian scientists did recently with their altered ocean temperature readings that were made to fit their model?

“Then what’s Universal Gravitation, then? ”

geez man. im not disputing all of science here.

“Drugs designed to combat bacteria that evolved resistance to penecillin work. ”

what about hot sauce? silly you say? maybe. but its a real example.
hot sauce is, well, hot. by its nature. kids and some adults even can’t deal with the “heat” and don’t like it. I personally know some kids under the age of 5 that will literally take a cup of hot sauce that is hot even for me (and I love the stuff) and down it in no time. i’ve never seen that in any other kid. ever. is that evolution at work? or should we really be calling it something else?

“No one in science seriously advocates that some gunk suddenly became some cells.”

they most certainly did. until Pasteur came along. Now, it seems, they’re back at it. only now they call it abiogenesis.

“They are called virii and there’s probably a few billion floating around you right now.”

no need to patronize. just because I don’t buy everything science tries to sell me doesn’t mean Im totally uninformed.

“playing into the cards of the ideologues who like to say people with your opinions are poorly informed.”

they like to say that because they need to believe it in order to be right. this is clearly illustrated by the level of ignorance about the particular religion represented here as well as a total lack of knowledge about the author of the article or myself. they see a target and they swarm it. all they need to know is that the target doesn’t think the way they do. that’s enough to warrant ridicule.

“Wow, grammar Naziism and ideology in one compact sentence.”

efficiency in action. hey, I didn’t say anything about the use of the word “than”. give me some credit. the alien comment was pure sarcasm and deserved no better in return. dang. I almost spelled return “retern”. that would have been bad.

I changed some things around. lets see if it gets posted.

well. sure. lots of things in our lives are also by their nature unscientific.
what’s your point?

“Science has loads of proof that intercessory Gods of the water-to-wine variety, or the literally-made-the-universe-in-six-days variety, do not exist. Meanwhile, science by definition cannot disprove a being whose existence is by definition supernatural.”

wow. contradict yourself much? first they have loads of proof that they don’t exist, then by definition they cannot disprove their existence.

please do share some of this “loads of proof”.

“Science can’t disprove the existence of, say, spirits, but it can prove that spirits are not necessary to adequately explain why creepy old houses creak in the night.”

ok. that provides a possible explaination. but that’s all. religion itself also provides a possible explaination. how about we stay away from the ridiculous examples of creaking houses and get on with what proof we have of life emerging from non-life. proof mind you. not possible explainations. without proof you are going on faith that what you believe is true, no matter how you came up with the idea.

“Except for the fact that the currently accepted model seems to fit observations as currently understood better than previous ones…”

and, that’s basically nothing more than a possible explaination. the flat earth used to be a “currently accepted model that seemed to fit observations as currently understood”. I wonder what ever happened to that?

self replicating prions?
“A prion is a nonliving, self-replicating infectious agent made of protein. It can reproduce with the aid of its host’s biological machinery, like a virus. “Prion” is short for “proteinaceous infectious particle.” http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-a-prion.htm

“Sweet Fanged God. It’s been honestly and openly observed in E. coli in a lab now.

so what did the e coli turn into? a frog? a bird? what? or was it just another tired example of socalled micro evolution that we continue to hear about?

“More than adaptation, we’re talking does-not-occur-in-nature-hey-that’s-new evilution.”

thats the problem. man-induced results in a lab are hardly proof of evolution. we would really need to see it occur in nature.

“Then there’s the fossil record,”

its just as possible that any two compared sets of bones were simply two different species to begin with. since we’re allowing possible explainations.

“demographic trends of populations showing physical adaptation to environmental stimuli, the fact that evolution fits the observational data much, much better than anything that came before…”

again, not really what the idea of true evolution is all about. just what they trot out to show as some sort of proof when they really have none. they say “if this can happen in x time, then y can happen in 10,000,000x time.” and yet it hasn’t been *proven*.

“An honest scientist will say that the model will always adapt to better fit observational data, but it must always include what made previous models right. Here’s a simple example:”

woo. like those australian scientists did recently with their altered ocean temperature readings that were made to fit their model?

“Then what’s Universal Gravitation, then? ”

geez man. im not disputing all of science here.

“Drugs designed to combat bacteria that evolved resistance to penecillin work. ”

what about hot sauce? silly you say? maybe. but its a real example.
hot sauce is, well, hot. by its nature. kids and some adults even can’t deal with the “heat” and don’t like it. I personally know some kids under the age of 5 that will literally take a cup of hot sauce that is hot even for me (and I love the stuff) and down it in no time. i’ve never seen that in any other kid. ever. is that evolution at work? or should we really be calling it something else?

“No one in science seriously advocates that some gunk suddenly became some cells.”

they most certainly did. until Pasteur came along. Now, it seems, they’re back at it. only now they call it abiogenesis.

“They are called virii and there’s probably a few billion floating around you right now.”

no need to patronize. just because I don’t buy everything science tries to sell me doesn’t mean Im totally uninformed.

“playing into the cards of the ideologues who like to say people with your opinions are poorly informed.”

they like to say that because they need to believe it in order to be right. this is clearly illustrated by the level of ignorance about the particular religion represented here as well as a total lack of knowledge about the author of the article or myself. they see a target and they swarm it. all they need to know is that the target doesn’t think the way they do. that’s enough to warrant ridicule.

“Wow, grammar Naziism and ideology in one compact sentence.”

efficiency in action. hey, I didn’t say anything about the use of the word “than”. give me some credit. the alien comment was pure sarcasm and deserved no better in return. dang. I almost spelled return “retern”. that would have been bad.

The only fault I find with it is that the author states that evolution is a fact. This is not true, and asserting it as such removes some of its meaning. We should remember that evolution is a product of science and that it is still in development. It is a very difficult concept to prove. So, it is still a theory, a powerful and useful theory.

Accepting that evolution is a theory gives those who use it the mindset and ability to assert that it came as a result of the scientific method. If we remove the scientific method from our theory, it becomes an assumption.

Creationism is an assumption and a belief. Evolution is a theory and an idea. In my mind evolution is more powerful and more developed in this way, so can we as an online community start calling evolution what it truly is?

If the displayed level of ignorance is any indicator, it appears that I know more about God than all of the previous commentors combined.

to say that its a controversial topic implies that its not the slam dunk win for science as the blog’s host would have us believe. I wish he would chime in. I’d love to see his response to some of my comments.

“Hey, Scoob, we’d better not feed it any of our snacks! Zoiks!”

>believing in God does not preclude one from believing in science or from trusting in the vast majority of it.

The belief in God itself? No. Many religions, especially those who espouse the literal truth of ancient texts, are by their dogmatic and unvarying nature unscientific.

> Science on the other hand seems to require itself to disallow the very concept of God, eventhough its not very scientific to be excluding possibilities without having some sort of proof that they can be safely ignored.

Um, no.

Science itself, as a methodology, defines itself by excluding the supernatural as an acceptable explanation for the causes natural effects. This is how it works. Science can not and does not say that there is no God because God, being supernatural, is not one of the effects it can explain, by definition. Science can say, if one’s being cheeky, that there appears to be strong evidence against an intercessory God that does not play by strict rules–in other words, if there is a God, It doesn’t go about changing dogs into cats. Naturalistic causes for naturalistic effects does not philosophically preclude God from acting through those causes, but science is by definition materialistic and mechanistic.

> Last I heard, Science has no proof of the inexistence of God.

Science has loads of proof that intercessory Gods of the water-to-wine variety, or the literally-made-the-universe-in-six-days variety, do not exist. Meanwhile, science by definition cannot disprove a being whose existence is by definition supernatural.

Science can’t disprove the existence of, say, spirits, but it can prove that spirits are not necessary to adequately explain why creepy old houses creak in the night.

> have you heard otherwise?

Dawkins goes a bit further than I do on the same evidence, but that’s his choice to make. I’d say no, others would say yes, as is our wont.

> They also don’t seem to have any actual, empirical proof of many closely held beliefs like the origin of the universe,

Except for the fact that the currently accepted model seems to fit observations as currently understood better than previous ones…

> the origin of life,

Self-replicating prions aren’t evidence enough of a gap between ‘living’ matter and ‘dead’ matter?

> and evolution.

Sweet Fanged God. It’s been honestly and openly observed in E. coli in a lab now. More than adaptation, we’re talking does-not-occur-in-nature-hey-that’s-new evilution. Then there’s the fossil record, demographic trends of populations showing physical adaptation to environmental stimuli, the fact that evolution fits the observational data much, much better than anything that came before…

> All they have are ideas, theories and possible explainations. an honest scientist will admit that no such proof can be presented for those topics.

Then what’s Universal Gravitation, then? An honest scientist will say that the model will always adapt to better fit observational data, but it must always include what made previous models right. Here’s a simple example: geocentrism explained why nearly everything in the sky moved in circles. Epicyclic geocentrism explained why some things in the sky moved in weird loops. Epicyclic heliocentrism dramatically simplified the explanation while maintaining predictive accuracy. Keplerian eccentric heliocentrism simplified the explanation further and removed error from the epicyclic models. Newtonian gravity provided a method for the eccentric system to work, did not require that the sun hold a special place in the universe, and increased predictive accuracy immensely (although Mercury was still problematic). Relativity brought the predictive accuracy issues of Mercury in line and seems to be universally applicable…

BUT. Solve relativistic equations correctly, and convert them to the right reference frame, and they can still reproduce the results of the geocentric model. Everything moves in crazy curlicues, yes, but the validity of geocentrism (from the viewpoint of standing on the Earth, things go in circles) still stands.

As evolution has large amounts of validity to it, any future theory must take this validity into account and explain everything that evolution does.

> the research and development of the artificial heart is a direct development of evolutionary concepts? which ones exactly?

The design iterations required to build it and improve it, for one, but that’s me being cheeky and you being dishonest. Gene therapy, based on evolutionary principles, works. Drugs designed to combat bacteria that evolved resistance to penecillin work. Genetically modified crops, which is just us taking evolution by the reins, work.

> and what about the development of pasteurization? that led directly to the scientific belief that life emerging from non-life was impossible. correct me if i’m wrong, but that particular belief is no longer in active scientific service.

And there’s you being dishonest again. Spontaneous generation of complex life certainly was disproven by Pasteur. No one in science seriously advocates that some gunk suddenly became some cells. No, there were transitionary elements between dead matter and complex life. Prions are a modern example, but there is an entire, widespread class of items which science still argues about whether they are actually living or not.

They are called virii and there’s probably a few billion floating around you right now.

> sounds to me like he just wants to take the oportunity to spout off at the “heretic” who questions his closely held beliefs. why, that does sound rather like how Debbie tried to describe me above.

And you’re really being a big boy right now playing into the cards of the ideologues who like to say people with your opinions are poorly informed.

Interesting reversal. (Yes, I know, I just undercut myself with that, but I just could not resist ^_^ )

> be scientific and show me empirical evidence of these aliens.

I think he was speaking in the hypothetical.

> are abortions now so revered that we capitalize the word?

Wow, grammar Naziism and ideology in one compact sentence. Actually, no, Abortions are now discouraged by the Ruling Liberal Elite. We prefer the phrase Preemptively Euthanizing Excess Population Units Legally (PEEPUL).

*waits for KC to get back, because KC is cool*

I don’t think he knows any more about God and what his intentions are anymore than a fish in the ocean. Just my 2 cents.