Looks like my comment got hung up in moderation for awhile.

I agreed with you two hours before you wrote your comment.

See

March 23rd, 2006 at 7:36 am

it’s kind of like the Rumsfeld mantra. There’s stuff we know, stuff we don’t know and stuff we don’t know we don’t know.

It is very unscientific. In simple terms, it’s called a “fudge factor”; in simpler terms, it’s called cheating. The scientific method is successful precisely because it doesn’t allow appeals to authority or to a deus ex machina for answers to questions. You have to figure out the answer and publish it so that someone else can try to duplicate and validate your answer, or you have to go back to the drawing board. Appealing to the supernatural for help in a scientific endeavor is silly and self-defeating for a number of reasons. One of them is that in science you can’t put things into a theory that can’t be defined, because that leaves the door open to making your undefined entity “X” be the magical wand-waver that makes all your difficulties vanish.

No pain, no gain in science. And no appeals to supernatural beings, either. Science deals with the material world and material causes and effects.. no matter what that idiot Philip Johnson says.

“Have you ever read the work of Guy Murchie?
This isn t Jerry Falwell vs. Richard Dawkins on the Today Show. The greatest minds that ever existed on this planet have wrestled with these issues for nearly 8,000 years. Do you think you re going stroll in here and wish it all away with the magic words,  Sorry – unscientific ? Is  unscientific a curse word? Are you telling me that scientists, all of them , with their cumulative knowledge, know everything?”

Frank_D, they know the most important things there are to know – they know how to find out the truth (or at least the facts), and they know how to do it without resorting to a supernatural crutch. Who cares if the greatest minds that have ever existed on the planet have spent 8,000 years on this? It wasn’t until the 19th century that this wrestling produced the logic and the background and the environment that made it possible for Darwin to conceive of his theory, and it’s only in the late 20th century and early 21st that computer technology made it possible to simulate evolution and test out different variations on evolutionary theory. For the record, this is called “Artificial Life”.

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/23/comic_advises_women_.html

http://tinyurl.com/zm7rq

I was referring to the process whereby Darwinian evolution entered the educational system. It was, in a sense, competing with other theories, and it its adherents and its opponents.”

Frank:

In an earlier thread (the one regarding regarding the small town paper editorial on the state of Blacks in the US) you chastised me and others for what you perceived as gratuitous insults. I posted a response, but the thread was already so far down, I don’t know if you saw it. Don’t do the same thing to me. This “lefty” was agreeing with you that potential theories have to compete with each other.

My point was, no theory should be mandated or proscribed by legislation. Do you disagree?

And no, science doesn’t have all the answers. Darwin is burried in Westminster Abby along with Newton, who was almost as much of a biblical scholar as he was a scientist.

It would be interesting to present evolution and ID, side by side, to see how they each stack up against those steps.

But, as I said above, that’s for educators (i.e., the Board of Education) to hash out, not City or Town Councils, or State legislatures.

You couldn’t be further from the truth.

Do you realize what you typed?

I explicitly stated that you can have any ideosyncratic {Deviating from the customary: bizarre, cranky, curious, eccentric, erratic, freakish, odd, outlandish, peculiar, quaint, queer, quirky, singular, strange, unnatural, unusual, weird} belief system you choose.

It is not a reflection on you as a person Read: You’re OK
unless you are unable to change your mind. Read: believe what we believe.

But if you come into this open forum and try to spout junk science as fact, you should expect that you are going to be shot down. It is not a reflection on you as a person unless you are unable to change your mind.

Perhaps I was fortunate that I educated myself for 20+ years before I returned to college and finished. I had what was once called a liberal education — one that taught me that everything we know doesn’t come from the world of science — far from it.

I don’t you think should consider it “unscientific” to believe that God was, and is involved in the process of evolution. I find it much more satisfying than trying to believe that I, and all other humans, are the result of some solar scale game of pinball.

And I don’t really think that you or anybody else on earth should tell me to confine my beliefs to the privacy of my own home. I have as much right to be heard as anybody. It has become a well – worn cliche among liberals that if you don’t like — pornography, liberal documentaries, anti – religious programming, “fill in the blank” — you can just turn it off. But when a person comes along with a belief you don’t like, you can nonchalantly tell him, “You’re free to talk about that in your own home, but not where I or anybody else can hear you.”

I’m here to tell you, “Chuck you, farley!” That’s not the America I grew up in, and if it changed when I wasn’t paying attention, I didn’t get the Memo.