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.

I am not quite sure I figured out which end of the cows fart. But I am definite sure I got it wrong about you when I used common sense. My advice is you should probably fart less and save the world from global warming!

Come on respect your own intelligence a little bit please! Don\’t let me ridicule you like that! It\’s so silly that it is not even funny any more.

The CNN link is here:
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/NATURE/07/21/cow.methane.enn/

Quantoken

What’s most amusing, here, is that you don’t even know which end of the cow the methane comes from.

Whatever …

(Why am I breaking one of the cardinal rules of blogdom?)

When experts are telling you that farts from cows are contributing \”significantly\” to global warming, do you need any further discussion. Do you still retain any respect for such scientists?

And yes there is a \”consensus\” on craps like this in the orthodox research community.

Quantoken

You need to look at both sides to be able to make a judgement. Not only you need to read Real Climate, you also need to read Climate Audit. Compare both, think use your own brain, and draw conclusion.

Now, the green house effect is REAL. Nobody question that. A clear evidence being that cloudy nights seem to be warmer, since water vapor is a green house gas.

The problem with Global Warming Theory is Quantity. Water vapor is by far the most dorminant green house gas, all other GH gases attribute only an insignificant percentage. If the total green house effect warmed up the surface of earth by 20 degree than otherwise, then probably no more than 1 or 2 degrees is attributable to CO2, which is less than 400 ppm in the atmosphere. Out of those 400 ppm, only a very small percentage could be attributed to human activity, if ever at all. Further, they totally ignored the fact that CO2 attributable to natural carbon cycle, like metabolism of biotics, are several orders of magnitude higher than human contribution, and it\’s a very dynamic system far from being equilibrium. They also ignored the fact that there has always been dramatic climate changed throughout billions of years of evolution of the earth, long before humen occured.

This total disregard of order of magnitude is so absurd it\’s even funny. I once read, maybe on Science Magazine. That they are discussing the global warming effects due to extra methane emitted from the farts of cows in New Zealand. That\’s indeed a very huge FART, but on the part of the so called experts, not on cows.

I assume most readers here are educated enough to do this simple calculation: Assuming that every adults in developed countries, which is about 300 million people, drives 50 miles to work every day, and consumes 2 gallons of gasoline every day. How many ppm of CO2 does it add to the earth atmosphere, if you keep driving your cars for one thousand years. Is it 1 ppm? 10ppm, 100 ppm, 1000ppm? The result will surprise you!!!

The total CO2 in the atmosphere, if distributed amoung populations, averages to 400 tons per person, young or old, rich or poor. Burning a couple gallons really does not add that much CO2. And not to meantion all those gasolines are FOSSIL FUELS, and was once the CO2 in the atmosphere before they were absorbed by ancient plantations which turned into petroleum!!!!

Quantoken

What is needed is an unashamed, unapologetic acceptance of the teaching of the Bible, whether or not it can be made to “make sense” to scientific minds or meet the demands of personal whims or needs. Without a response to the apologetic of materialist-science that begins with a ringing, “Thus saith the Lord,” our counterattack will lack the prophetic authority of an inspired message, boldly proclaimed and consistently lived.

This blatantly anti-science attitude just doesn’t play well in much of America anymore, though it does still work in some places (one of my neighbors is in this camp). An end to this truce would be very divisive. I don’t think science would be wiped out, but I do think that in vast areas of the country science teaching would totally degenerate into some sort of Creation Institute inspired anti-science. However, other parts of the country would probably fair quite well. I’d like to keep the truce.

Note that I did not say that we should promote atheism in the public schools, only “teach the controversy.” I have difficulty seeing how we can allow evidence of God’s existence in science class without allowing evidence of his non-existence, but there is probably some way to argue that promoting God is acceptable but promoting atheism is too sectarian. What I do worry about is that 99% of science teachers won’t be able to navigate this mess and science will look like a he-said-she-said debate. At that point “thus saith the Lord” will become pretty compelling again.

Gavin

Well, at least one time “yes.” I happened to have had a very good experience listening to a philosopher drone on about Popper and Kuhn. I ultimately came away from my philosophy of science class firmly on the side of science, but the experience sharpened my understanding of just what is science. And I like to think that this makes me a better practitioner by being more conservative with the realism I attribute to physical models. Yes, one could learn this from a “real” scientist, but as we know, the background required to appreciate the exciting roughness of forefront research makes it impractical for a non-specialist to glean the scientific method real time.

As it stands, most students take away from intro physics courses not much more than a handfull of formulae and little understanding of how they were discovered.

You aren’t the only physicist puzzled by his rants on global warming. It’s kind of bizarre, actually.

Religion is simply much, much more powerful than science in this country, in terms of politics and in terms of mindshare. We can’t afford to take it on directly.

Lubos is completely wrong on this issue, at least in the opinion of this physicist. You can check out RealClimate for good information on this subject.