I do, however, resent it when evolution is taught as the only intellegent option, and that everyone who beleives in an intellegent creator is being stupid.

Not everyone who believes in an intelligent creator is stupid — it’s a belief without evidence, though, and they have to hold it on this rather optimistic idea called “faith”. It isn’t a sound foundation for rational thought, but heck, there are some smart people around who can cope despite the handicap.

However, people who whine that there is no evidence for evolution, that it is a theory based on chance, that they don’t like the idea that they are the offspring of fish and monkeys, clearly do not understand the theory they are criticizing. When they go on and on about it, compounding their ignorance with a damnably willful, arrogant refusal to learn…well, those people are stupid.

And the ones who rant about how they really are intelligent while consistently and repeatedly spelling it “intellegent”…they’re pathetically funny, too.

I don’t have a problem with other people beleiving in evolution. I don’t have a problem with learning about it. Nor am I one to force my beliefs on others. I do, however, resent it when evolution is taught as the only intellegent option, and that everyone who beleives in an intellegent creator is being stupid.

You say might say that creationist have no solid evidence that we can present to support our theory. I would like to point out that evolutionists don’t either. Random chance is not any more acceptable as a theory on paper than the words “then somehow a miracle happened” would be in the middle of a mathematical proof on my final exam. There is a reason for everything.

The entire universe IS a miracle, whether attributed to a God or to dice. The functionality of a single bacteria, let alone innumerable superior beings, still perplexes the most exalted scientists of our time. To attribute, not only the perfect environment to flourish, but to have such beauty and perfect ratios of life-sustaining nessesities and convenient bodily functions to nothing but the luckiest of chance is, in my mind, a riduciously flawed thought process.

Yes, if an infinite amount of monkeys pounded on an infinite number of keyboards for an indefinite amount of time, eventually one of them would happen to type out the entire book of Genesis, or if that analogy offends you, next week’s issue of the New York Times. HOWEVER, while the universe is very very big, it is not infinitely massive, and the celestial laws that govern our universe don’t pound on keyboards to create planets and their occupants.

No, I do not beleive we are the offspring of fish and monkeys. To suggest such seems to me a blatant betrayal of the incredable gift to logical reasoning that we have been given.

The crisis is all too obvious.

In mathematics, most propositions are true but cannot be proved in any sufficiently complex logical system, although many mathematicians firmly believe that “truly relevant theorems” always have an accessible proof. Strikingly, the foundations of modern mathemtics remain undecided (What is the continuum hypothesis? What is the Riemann hypothesis? What are L-functions? What is “set”?)

In computer science, the majority of algorithms compute non-recursive functions non-effectively, although only effective algorithms are practically computable thus far.

In physics, 95% of the energy and mass in the Universe remain unknown, although many physicists continue to believe that dark matter and dark energy are concepts of 19th and 20th century physics.

In biology, and five decades after the formulation of the “central dogma”, the latter has in fact become a central enigma (while being a dilemma concurrently): e.g., up to 97% of the mammalian genome is without sense to us (in a quick act of dispair, some scientists have called it “junk DNA”), protein translation and folding is a big problem as it ever was, and epi-genetics is about to change the laws of reproduction, heredity and evolution as we know it. And the theory of evolution itself, although often successful locally, fails to explain the origins and the purpose of life.

There are more Jungian shadows in other disciplines(neuroscience vs consciousness, for instance), and together with the often deadly and bizarre outgrowths of modern scientific endevour (60 years after Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki), scientists should be humble enough to realize that the last 2000 years of scientific exploration have not been the path to human glory. It is then difficult to embrace for some conservative characters, but well understandable otherwise, that a societal and inescapable counterculture to mainstream science must emerge in direct consequence, as in fact does ID.

Facing the immediate challenges for the human race, science must recreate itself again–as it did more than 2000 years ago–if both want to survive. Hopefully, then, unscientific countercultures will catalyze the unfolding of a truly philanthropic science before it is too late.

Your expose about the greenhouse effect is probably too naive.

Water vapor in the troposphere, unlike the better-known greenhouse gases such as CO2, is essentially passive in terms of climate: the residence time for water vapor in the atmosphere is short (about a week) so perturbations to water vapor rapidly re-equilibriate. In contrast, the lifetimes of CO2, methane, etc, are long (hundreds of years) and hence perturbations remain. Thus, in response to a temperature perturbation caused by enhanced CO2, water vapor would increase, resulting in a (limited) positive feedback and higher temperatures. In response to a perturbation from enhanced water vapor, the atmosphere would re-equilibriate due to clouds causing reflective cooling and water-removing rain. The contrails of high-flying aircraft sometimes form high clouds which seem to slightly alter the local weather. [From wikipedia on "The Greenhouse Effect"]

I’m not a huge fan of Gould’s “nonoverlapping magisteria” notion, partly because I’m nonreligious myself and partly because in practice religions don’t keep very well to their supposed magisterium. But the metaphysical component of most major religions is not something that is really scientifically attackable, since it can always retreat to making non-empirical claims. A scientist who continued to go after it into that terrain attempting to continue to use scientific arguments would be bound to fail. The best the scientist can say as a scientist is that it’s not science. This isn’t just a political compromise, it’s prudent methodology.