I don't think it is either. I just think it should be taught that way. I already made a post just like your second paragraph. But it has always been assumed to me. I didn't need anyone to spell it out.
In a sense, yes. (Btw, and not to get off topic, but I’ve tried to wade through some of the stuff you’ve posted on emptiness but never got far enough through it to get a clear sense of what they were saying. In a general sense I suspect that this is one of the key differences between Christianity and Buddhism as one of the keys to Christianity I would call a sense of fullness or completeness, so if you’re interested could you provide a brief high level summary, perhaps in another threa? We could go from there and we could introduce more detail as required.)
So I guess you guys have a pretty good handle on Dark Matter, Dark Energy and the prevailing cosmologocal conditions at the time the present Big Bang happend. You know you might want to call up Stephen Hawking and let him in on it cause I heard he had some questions .
That's ok, this is all I will say in this thread... Emptiness just means empty of a separate self. Everything is connected to everything else. It's a totally different meaning that that which is commonly thought of. You can get a sense of completeness when you recognize this. My post here describes emptiness: http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=99572 Thich Nhat Hanh calls it interbeing (I think because the term emptiness has negative connotations in our society)
Technical jargons are sometimes harder to master than foreign languages because it's encountered less frequently by the average person. This wedge by Bush would probably make biological terms more misunderstood. It's sad that terms such as speciation or genetic drift are currently more commonplace in the textbooks of other countries as politics muddle into curricula. If Americans were truly worried about losing our sci/tech lead, this would be one area to start. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4708459.stm
So then you do believe that any widely accepted scientific theory that has unexplained issues and alternative hypothesis should be taught. So we should be teaching that atoms may not be composed of nuclei and electrons, that HIV may not be the cause of AIDS and so on..
Apparently I am doing a horrible job because I confused both you and grizzled. You originally said I was not being fair to rhester because none of us are scientists and cannot fully speak to scientific theory. My next response (which initiated your response that I quoted in this post) was meant to explain that you misunderstood - that my problem was with rhester trying to label science as unchanging and not willing to examine itself. Note I have not entered the evolution debate at all - I am just responding to this one area. I hope this was a general statement and not a defensive response to what you thought I meant. My point with my last part was that I don't care about evolution or God in this thread, I only care about (continually) misrepresenting the way science and scientists work.
Evolution doesn't but Physics does through the Big Bang an I haven't heard or expect many proponents of Evolution disagree with physicist on this matter. Is it a position of ID to also challenge the Big Bang as a theory for the creation of matter? If so what methodology do they argue for the creation of matter? How the heck is that a false statement just above you say that some ID proponents believe in the supernatural and Alien life forms but you think discussions like that should be taken to philosophy and religion classes. You're saying yourself right there that ID doesn't give a scientific explanation for the method of speciation. Because the understanding of things that cannot be directly observed requires inductive logic. Scientifically its proven that there is a process of change within organism based on mutation and adaption but if we are to believe a counter view that speciation is based on an intelligent designer is there any empirical evidence of that that could lead logically to that conclusion? If ID is to be taken scientifically shouldn't ID proponents be expected to show the proof of an intelligent designer as much as Evolution proponents are of mutation and adaption? Yes those are sound criticisms of Evolution now show prove why ID is more or even equally plausible. But why is it unlikely its random? Again a randomized fractal algorithm can create incredibly complex forms yet they are still random. If one were to observe Brownian motion one could detect complex patterns. Looking at the clouds one can read all sorts of patterns. What objective proof is there that its not random? I'm not saying ID is as bad as Evolution I'm saying that if ID proponents want ID to be considered a science then it needs to be subject to scientific standards just like Evolution. Evolution is primarily about the process of speciation through mutation and adaption and leaves out a question of causes. If ID is a plausible alternative to Evolution then it must also be willing to explain process. What you seem to be saying is that ID doesn't because those are supernatural issues beyond science. If so how then can we consider ID scientific if it doesn't even answer the central subject of how speciation occured. The problem with this debate is that ID proponents main argument is that Evolution is flawed because it can't explain everything. True, but if in that case ID the plausible alternative then ID should also be challenged to answer the questions that Evolution can't. For starters if the speciation is too complex to be explained through mutation and adaption then what is the process that causes speciation? If an intelligent designer is responsible what is the nature of that designer? Is there empiracal evidence that would support the existence of an intelligent designer? If ID can't or won't answer these questions then it can't be considered a scientific theory on its own but is only a criticism of Evolution.
For starters if the speciation is too complex to be explained through mutation and adaption then what is the process that causes speciation? Relative complexity is a funtion of the perception of the beholder. Given enough time and cycles of mutation anything is possible, in fact everything is possible. Life on Earth may seem incomprehensably complex to you but compared to all the the life that may occur on some billions planets over 12 billion years it may seem simple and undifferentated. To say life as we know it couldn't arise without design is to clearly misunderstand the scale of the infinite.
All the scientists who have died know more about the theory of evolution than all the living scientists today combined.
The Big Bang is a theory that explains the evolution of the universe. Unless I’m forgetting my high school physics, it doesn’t explain the coming into existence of the matter that went boom and spread out to form planets and galaxies and all the other bits. As you will have gathered by now, not all people who are pursuing the issue of intelligent design are pursuing theories related to the same intelligent designer. Even at that, may if not most of them would not agree that they were looking for “unknowable designers whose methods are unknowable.” You simply made that up. I don’t see that that statement has any relationship to most ID theories at all. Some parts of this knowledge can be sought in the science classroom and for the alien visitations theories I suspect all of it could be and is being dealt with purely scientifically, as much as any scientific theory is anyway. For other theories knowledge is sought and achieved, at least for parts of their theories, philosophically and/or spiritually. But again, I don’t see anything in ID that suggests the designers and/or their methods are unknowable. The term Maco-ID doesn’t really make sense to begin with because that’s essentially what ID is. It’s the break down, in scientific terms, of the theory of macroevolution (vertical evolution) that leads people to believe that there must, or there is more likely to be, some other explanation. It seems likely that life was not generated randomly and therefore it is more likely that it was generated non-randomly. We call that, at that high level of analysis, intelligent design. Does this clear things up at all? Given enough time a room full of monkeys could write a doctoral thesis, or paint the Mona Lisa, but we don’t have an unlimited amount of time. Further, we have much much smaller mounts of time between the great leaps in the fossil record, the most prominent of which is called the Cambrian explosion. So in a nutshell, there doesn’t appear to be anywhere near enough time for this to have happened through evolution. Evolutionists seem to have no explanation for this other than to that “something must have happened because we know evolution is true.” That, of course, is a statement of faith, not science. They are welcome to keep looking for an explanation, but other have started to believe that the evidence no longer fits the theory and that other possible explanations should be pursued. As a footnote I believe the alien visitation people point to these leaps as suggestive of external/alien seeing or altering of life on earth.
August 5, 2005 Design for Confusion By PAUL KRUGMAN I'd like to nominate Irving Kristol, the neoconservative former editor of The Public Interest, as the father of "intelligent design." No, he didn't play any role in developing the doctrine. But he is the father of the political strategy that lies behind the intelligent design movement - a strategy that has been used with great success by the economic right and has now been adopted by the religious right. Back in 1978 Mr. Kristol urged corporations to make "philanthropic contributions to scholars and institutions who are likely to advocate preservation of a strong private sector." That was delicately worded, but the clear implication was that corporations that didn't like the results of academic research, however valid, should support people willing to say something more to their liking. Mr. Kristol led by example, using The Public Interest to promote supply-side economics, a doctrine whose central claim - that tax cuts have such miraculous positive effects on the economy that they pay for themselves - has never been backed by evidence. He would later concede, or perhaps boast, that he had a "cavalier attitude toward the budget deficit." "Political effectiveness was the priority," he wrote in 1995, "not the accounting deficiencies of government." Corporations followed his lead, pouring a steady stream of money into think tanks that created a sort of parallel intellectual universe, a world of "scholars" whose careers are based on toeing an ideological line, rather than on doing research that stands up to scrutiny by their peers. You might have thought that a strategy of creating doubt about inconvenient research results could work only in soft fields like economics. But it turns out that the strategy works equally well when deployed against the hard sciences. The most spectacular example is the campaign to discredit research on global warming. Despite an overwhelming scientific consensus, many people have the impression that the issue is still unresolved. This impression reflects the assiduous work of conservative think tanks, which produce and promote skeptical reports that look like peer-reviewed research, but aren't. And behind it all lies lavish financing from the energy industry, especially ExxonMobil. There are several reasons why fake research is so effective. One is that nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it's got numbers and charts in it, doesn't that make it science? Even when reporters do know the difference, the conventions of he-said-she-said journalism get in the way of conveying that knowledge to readers. I once joked that if President Bush said that the Earth was flat, the headlines of news articles would read, "Opinions Differ on Shape of the Earth." The headlines on many articles about the intelligent design controversy come pretty close. Finally, the self-policing nature of science - scientific truth is determined by peer review, not public opinion - can be exploited by skilled purveyors of cultural resentment. Do virtually all biologists agree that Darwin was right? Well, that just shows that they're elitists who think they're smarter than the rest of us. Which brings us, finally, to intelligent design. Some of America's most powerful politicians have a deep hatred for Darwinism. Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, blamed the theory of evolution for the Columbine school shootings. But sheer political power hasn't been enough to get creationism into the school curriculum. The theory of evolution has overwhelming scientific support, and the country isn't ready - yet - to teach religious doctrine in public schools. But what if creationists do to evolutionary theory what corporate interests did to global warming: create a widespread impression that the scientific consensus has shaky foundations? Creationists failed when they pretended to be engaged in science, not religious indoctrination: "creation science" was too crude to fool anyone. But intelligent design, which spreads doubt about evolution without being too overtly religious, may succeed where creation science failed. The important thing to remember is that like supply-side economics or global-warming skepticism, intelligent design doesn't have to attract significant support from actual researchers to be effective. All it has to do is create confusion, to make it seem as if there really is a controversy about the validity of evolutionary theory. That, together with the political muscle of the religious right, may be enough to start a process that ends with banishing Darwin from the classroom. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/05/opinion/05krugman.html?pagewanted=print
The insinuation is there is a sinister politically motivated plot to use think tanks to introduce ideology that challenges hard science in an effort to sway the public perceptions. So these devious plots torpedo global warming, socialism and evolution at least in public perceptions. So as far as evolution goes you better lock step with it or the religious card will be pulled and you will silenced. You cannot have any origins science that is not evolutionary science because anything else is a religious view.
odd...my friend, Grizzled, might be surprised to learn he's subverting his own political causes so might a good portion of the Christian world.
