filtherton

What do you mean? It is a fact that i am typing this on a keyboard. It is a fact that my bluejeans are blue. It is a fact that i am currently being subject to a force that we call gravity. It is a fact that the ratio of a circle circumfrence to its diameter is pi, even though it is impossible for us to precisely define pi rationally. The number of facts in the world is only limited by one's ability to notice them. You could get all nihilist and claim that nothing exists, but if that's how you really felt, why would you waste time arguing with someone who doesn't even really exist?

Fibrosa

The layman's version put's theory on a scale between hypothesis and law, needless to say it's completely wrong.

Then the only things that are 'facts' are maths.

How do you know it works for you? That's the problem, you don't really-in fact, you can't. If we were to accept your view of what constitutes facts then we would find ourselves in the hopeless state of solipsism and no knowledge would be attainable.

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D'oh!

zen_tom

That's not quite the case - since all the relationships (by relationships I mean things we learn, things we experience, things we associate with one another) we invent are our-own, the only thing that matters is that they are not self-contradicting. Maths is a very good example of a system of tenets that holds up by itself (until you start quoting Gödel that is )

You are right, how do I know it works for me? Because somewhere you have to inject faith into the mix. Where you inject faith is up to you. How far you manage to go down the solipsistic rabbit-hole before it gets upsetting is up to you. Those who accept creation myths have probably not gone very far down that particular hole and have accepted something on trust. Some have a very different 'creation myth' that they call Evolution that they too have accepted on trust, its just that they've probably (but not necessarily) gone a little further into the hole first.

There are things we cannot know, it's been proven in multiple fields (by Gödel, Turing, Lorenz, Heisenberg and Einstein - among others) - and that may be the only true fact.

filtherton

Will that hold up in a court of law? That "we make our own reality- everything is subjective" idea will get you exactly nowhere in the actual world of actual things. You can't assert that nothing can be proven conclusively, because that implies that nothing is certain, which means you are essentially asserting that nothing can be asserted. That doesn't work.

1010011010

hannukah harry, I think the word you're looking for is "phlogiston".

And I think "Gravity is a fact." would be a statement about the observation that masses exert forces on each other. The quantification of that force (E.G. the math of Newton, Kepler, Einstein, et al.) may not be exact, but someone doing their sums wrong will not suddenly make masses repel. Even more abstraction occurs when we start asking why masses attract each other... and that's where gravitational theory finally comes into play.

Theory shows up relatively late in the game... but it's used to make all the other data coherent. Saying "Ah-ha, this is merely a theory!" doesn't change the simple matter that, even if this theory or that theory is not 100% correct... Whatever theory is 100% correct (and keep in mind, even if a theory was 100% correct, it would still be a theory) will be nigh on indistinguishable to the layman from what it replaces.

It's very baby and bathwater. "Evolution can't explain Z. Therefore it's a lie and Creationism is True." Ignoring the fact that evolution explains A through Y... and that whatever modifications that may be made to formulate a theory that explains A through Y and Z will result in a theory that bears more resemblance to the original evolutionary theory than it does to Creationism. This ignoring the fact that "evolution can't explain Z" type statements generally stem from a shortcoming of a creationist's conception of evolution rather than any shortcoming of evolution as it actually is.

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Simple Machines in Higher Dimensions

zen_tom

It's not supposed to - a court of law and a philosophical debate are two very different things.

If you haven't already, you should read about Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem.

Don't think that I walk around wondering if anything is real, or whether the laws of gravity might suddenly give up - that's not it at all - but we're not talking about the actual world of actual things. I can assert however that nothing can be proven, because I accept that there has to be some element of 'faith' for anything to make any sense - I know it sounds contradictory, but it's not. Proof is not a requirement for truth.

zen_tom

Saying that something can't be proven conclusively does imply that nothing is certain. Yes there is an element of contradiction in that - but one that I'm happy to accept since I'm pointing out that logical reasoning alone isn't ever capable of finding the truth.

filtherton

I know they are different, it's just that any philospohical debate can be ended simply by claiming that nothing is objective and provable. That isn't a standard by which anything should be measured if one wants to make philosphy about what goes on in the actual world as opposed to the philosophical world. I know that i couldn't prove to you that i exist, for all you know i could be advanced a.i., or a "ghost in the machine". If we wanted to we could negate the act of experience alltogether because no one has ever been able to define conscousness in consistent terms. None of this really matters when it comes down to it, because the fact is that we all have to eat, sleep, shit, and go to work tomorrow. The fact is that you can render any fact meaningless if you raise your standards high enough.

Here are facts that can only be disputed if you deny reality completely: Evolution has been tested and retested by the scientific process, creationism has been tested by no one. There is faith in science, but this faith is in the idea that the universe behaves in a consistent manner than can be figured out based on observation. Creationism relies on a different kind of faith, a faith that the world was created by a supernatural entity in seven days. If you want to believe that these two faiths are equal in value and plausibility, by all means. That's where we'll have to agree to disagree.


So what are you doing in a philosphical discussion? You can't find any truth in it, so what's the point?

zen_tom

I don't believe those faiths mentioned are equal in value and plausability at all, but they ARE faiths. One just happens to be far more elegant and is built on sturdier ground than the other.

The point? That's a whole different can of worms - But I do think that we are doing more than just applying logic. If it was as simple as that, you should be able to program a computer to work it all out for us a la Deep Thought - and that just isn't possible. I'm not denigrating logic, or rationality, but I am pointing out their limits.

If we believe in science and logic without really understanding why, we are just replacing one set of fundamentalist ideas with another.

filtherton

How could we be doing more than applying logic? I understand intuition, but intuition applies to a philosophical discussion with no relevance.

I understand why we believe in science and logic, because science and logic do a damn good job of explaining the things that we see everyday. In fact, they do such a good job, that we can create technology based on our scientific understanding of the world around us. "The proof is in the pudding", as my old leisure suit wearing sociology professer would say. Creationism has zero value as a predicter of how things will behave or an explainer of why things are the way they are. We believe in science and logic because so far it has paid off for use to believe in science and logic.

Science as a fundamentalist ideology will be a problem as soon as science starts telling people how they can or cannot live. Until then, i think science is the ideal fundamentalism because it is based on adherence to finding accurate representations of our universe. Creationism is based on adherence to a single idea which has little relevance to anything anymore, aside from an "aw shucks look at how powerful our god is" kind of christian machismo.

coash

"Evolution is only a theory; it hasn't been proved."

First, we should clarify what "evolution" means. Like so many other words, it has more than one meaning. Its strict biological definition is "a change in allele frequencies over time." By that definition, evolution is an indisputable fact. Most people seem to associate the word "evolution" mainly with common descent, the theory that all life arose from one common ancestor. Many people believe that there is enough evidence to call this a fact, too. However, common descent is still not the theory of evolution, but just a fraction of it (and a part of several quite different theories as well). The theory of evolution not only says that life evolved, it also includes mechanisms, like mutations, natural selection, and genetic drift, which go a long way towards explaining how life evolved.

Calling the theory of evolution "only a theory" is, strictly speaking, true, but the idea it tries to convey is completely wrong. The argument rests on a confusion between what "theory" means in informal usage and in a scientific context. A theory, in the scientific sense, is "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena" [Random House American College Dictionary]. The term does not imply tentativeness or lack of certainty. Generally speaking, scientific theories differ from scientific laws only in that laws can be expressed more tersely. Being a theory implies self-consistency, agreement with observations, and usefulness. (Creationism fails to be a theory mainly because of the last point; it makes few or no specific claims about what we would expect to find, so it can't be used for anything. When it does make falsifiable predictions, they prove to be false.)

Lack of proof isn't a weakness, either. On the contrary, claiming infallibility for one's conclusions is a sign of hubris. Nothing in the real world has ever been rigorously proved, or ever will be. Proof, in the mathematical sense, is possible only if you have the luxury of defining the universe you're operating in. In the real world, we must deal with levels of certainty based on observed evidence. The more and better evidence we have for something, the more certainty we assign to it; when there is enough evidence, we label the something a fact, even though it still isn't 100% certain.

What evolution has is what any good scientific claim has--evidence, and lots of it. Evolution is supported by a wide range of observations throughout the fields of genetics, anatomy, ecology, animal behavior, paleontology, and others. If you wish to challenge the theory of evolution, you must address that evidence. You must show that the evidence is either wrong or irrelevant or that it fits another theory better. Of course, to do this, you must know both the theory and the evidence.

talkorigins

Furry

As regards the actual teaching of it, and those damn fool stickers on on biology textbooks... Shouldn't the bible carry one too?

You have to keep political and pressure-group influence out of education as much as possible if you want a thoughtful, balanced student populace.

I fail to see exactly how all this became an issue in the first place; could someone please explain exactly who/where/when/what happened to create such an outcome? Was it christian fundamentalist groups or was the legislatative involved?

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hannukah harry

why are telling me this after quoting me saying that? gravity is a fact. if i hold an apple while standing on my roof and then let go, it will fall. that is a fact. maybe i shouldn't have said 'scientific' fact, maybe that's going a bit too far... but otherwise you're just repeating me.

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shabbat shalom, mother fucker! - the hebrew hammer

hannukah harry

i never was much at spelling. but i mention the 'fact' and theory of gravity in a previous post... in case you missed that. maybe i just didn't specify enough? but i understand and already knew what you're saying. just for clarification.

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shabbat shalom, mother fucker! - the hebrew hammer

coash

anyone read the national geographic?

The front page said "Was Darwin Wrong"

Then the head of the article: a big "NO"
AHAHHAAHAHHAHA

kirth gersen

Creationism should not be taught alongside evolution in a science class because it is not supported by the body of scientific evidence we have. Evolution theory, imperfect hypothesis as it may be, is supported by our body of scientific evidence and is the most scientifically plausible theory presented to date. Therefore, evolution is perfectly appropriate to a science class.
Creationism, having no grounding in scientific evidence should only be taught in places like churches - where science is supplanted by faith.

RCAlyra2004

This debate rages on and On. Here are a couple of simple truths that I think most of us will agree with.

As human beings we tend to be biased in our thinking. Often we want very hard for things to be true or correct. This bias affects both sides of the creation/evolution debate.

There are scientists who have been tempted to overstate their findings( hell some have greatly overstated thier findings)

Ther are religious zealots who have overstated what scripture says (hell some of them greatly overstate what scripture says)

The truth is that none of us really "know" where we come from.

Christians "hope" is placed in God through his son Jesus Christ.

Many scientists are Christians/Muslims/Jewish.

Evolution is not necessarily directly opposed to scripture... read scripture again with evolution in mind and you will see this is a silly debate Both theories should be allowed for our children to debate in school. All theories should be questioned!

Remember: one of the truths about Statistical analysis... Correlation is not causation...

Therefore Evolution is still just a theory to explain the correlation of facts associated with biological similarities amoung various species. Anyone who tells you differently has not been paying attention in class... including some professors at my university.

Theories do not scare me; whether presented by Christians professing biblical ideas or scientists professing biology ideas based on evolutionary theory. Fundamentalist science freaks or fundamentalist Christians scare me alot, due to their lack of objectivity.

Any one who speaks about knowing the truth absolutely about these topics is making their assumption based on faith (scientist or christian... it doesn't matter)

Therefore .. I am correct... and you are all wrong...


ha ha Have a great day!

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Living on the edge of sanity

Fibrosa

What do you mean by 'still just a theory'?

What else would it be? Hell, what else could it be?

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D'oh!

1010011010

RCAlyra,
Creationists take issue with common descent. That's pretty much it. The rest is window dressing.

A while back it was discovered that a brand of lab mice had become contaminated by mutants, and had been for a while. Lab mice aren't just random albino mice from a pet store. They are ridiculously pedigreed like purebred dogs. By having these purebred uniform mice you can do controlled biological research. Otherwise, how would you know if your result is due to what you want to study and not due to some biological difference between your control and test populations? Simple, by having genetically uniform mice in respect to the trait you're studying. Thus, ridiculously pedigreed lab mice. Different brands suited to different purposes.

So what happens when you discover that some of your purebred mice aren't suitable for their advertized purpose, and that the mutant mice may have skewed the results of years of research?

Well, you dig up those preserved specimens, you dig up that ridiculous pedigree, and work out which litter contained your original mutant. Then you track the mutation all the way through your pedigree, and provide the necessary information to allow the data to be corrected for the presence of the mutants. Also, you seperate out your current inventory and relabel the mutants as a new product. Neat stuff.

Here's the really neat thing. This is only possible because the "family tree" generated by genome analysis is identical to the recorded pedigree. The sequence comparison algorithms used in genome analysis have a proven track record in the real world. It's also possible to simulate sequence evolution on a computer for millions of generations. The algorithms prove themselves there, as well. So, not only do we know that the algorithms work, we can quantify how well they work. They can report their own confidence in the "family trees" they generate.

So. What does it mean when we can take genetic sequence data from all sorts of life on earth, run it through these verified and tested algorithms, and have them spit back out a high confidence "family tree"? Correlation is not causation, true, but we have tools that will tell you how slim the chances are that it's not.

Should all that be necessary for highschool biology? Of course not. But all that and more is available underpinning the statement in highschool biology classes that life on earth shares common ancestry. Theories should be questioned, but the questions asked by creationists have already been answered... there is no debate where the creationists wish to debate.

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SecretMethod70

Anyone read this thread? The first paragraph has been quoted http://www.tfproject.org/tfp/showthr...65#post1530065 I'll add some more once I gain access to the rest of the article.

Anyway, there's something important that's being forgotten here. Whatever you feel like believing about creationism, I think 99% of us can agree that evolution is, at least, much more scientifically sound and proven. Now, if you want to say that evolution existing is not a fact or that creationism is not proven entirely wrong, it doesn't matter so long as you can understand that evolution is FAR more proven than creationism to the point where we at least know that science is moving towards something like evolution and away something like creationism. (As has been said, when there is an evolutionary theory that explains A through Z, it will look more like the evolutionary theory that explains A through Y and not like creationist theory).

So, with all that in mind comes the simple fact: there is not enough TIME to teach creationism and make an "example" of the scientific method out of it. Many of the posts I've read here could make one think that education takes place in a vacuum of time or something. There are limits. Likewise, there's not enough time to go into details about evolution to "prove" it to students who are not willing to accept it. So, all one really needs to accept is that evolution has a crapload more going for it than creationism. And I don't care WHAT you want to define "theory" as; it does.

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Le temps détruit tout

"Musicians are the carriers and communicators of spirit in the most immediate sense." - Kurt Elling

Strange Famous

Bill Hicks kinda had a point

Creationalism sure would be the easiest class to pass

"And God created the earth and everything on it in 6 days and then on the 7th day he rested... ok, class dismissed"

"really... is this gonna be on the test?"

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"Do not tell lies, and do not do what you hate,
for all things are plain in the sight of Heaven. For nothing
hidden will not become manifest, and nothing covered will remain
without being uncovered."

The Gospel of Thomas

Bill O'Rights

OK, this...ammused me.

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"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony

"Hedonism with rules isn't hedonism at all, it's the Republican party." - JumpinJesus

It is indisputable that true beauty lies within...but a nice rack sure doesn't hurt.

longbough

What we often forget is that the most important aspect about introducing subjects such as astronomy and evolution in biology at the primary school level is to introduce the applicabilty and history of the "scientific method." From what I recall these classes center around teaching the methods of experimentation and the skills of observation. One can't parallel the teaching of creationism with the teaching of evolution because the basic message is entirely different.
Even many teachers can lose sight of the fact that evolution isn't about "These are all the answers to the mystery of life", but about "These are where our questions are taking us - but we still don't have all the answers."
At higher levels of education this is more readily apparent. Basic science questions itself and accepts that change (with new observation and theory) is a natural part of science itself.

Who knows? Some day an optical telescope might even discover some pearly gates in the clouds - or that Hell exists somewhere beneath the earth's crust - then we might come full circle in our beliefs. The point is that we found it ourselves without passive blind faith. I believe in God (faith)- but I also believe we were created to be inquisitive and intelligent to explore the mechanisms of His creation through science.

coash

some day, but not now. that day may come when we find the origin of life. the best bet to find that would be through the scientific method. right now the scientific method has crap all on proving creationism



edit:hey any admin...can I get an avatar....i can't wait that long....and I want to play the rate my avatar game

Bill O'Rights

Well...let me ponder it for a moment.


Nahhhh.

__________________
"I distrust those people who know so well what God wants them to do because I notice it always coincides with their own desires." - Susan B. Anthony

"Hedonism with rules isn't hedonism at all, it's the Republican party." - JumpinJesus

It is indisputable that true beauty lies within...but a nice rack sure doesn't hurt.

RCAlyra2004

Fibrosa, I actually agree with you... But to squash the debate would remove the Objectivity. Just remember the Correlation IS NOT causation. even if we both agree

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Thermopyle

I didnt have the energy to read every post in this thread and I guess what I say here has already been said a dozen of times.

But sure they can teach creationism in school, as long as it's during the religion lessons and not during biology. Creationism is not a scientifically built theory and therefor is not science. I think the distinction is important because the kids should know the difference between fact and belives. There are no facts in creationism at all. Teaching creationism during biology like a scientific theory is basically liyng to the kids. Sure there are flaws in evolution theory but using creationism as a alternartive is not science and not what science is about.

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Cervantes

This might be of interest to this thread:
http://wilstar.com/theories.htm

Since so many misunderstand the idea of what a Scientific Theory is and how it stands in relation to a Layman Theory.
Creationsim isn't even a hypothesis it is faith straight through, it has no solid evidence and isn't even a welleducated guess.
Faith shouldn't be taught in schools, religion (objectivly and with equal time to all major religions) should.

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- "Philosophy is questions that may never be answered. Religion is answers that may never be questioned.."
- "Religions take everything that your DNA naturally wants to do to survive and pro-create and makes it wrong."
- "There is only one absolute truth and that is that there is only one absolute truth."

jonjon42

I'm still wondering what you could actually teach when teaching creationism/ID...seriously what is their to teach. a high power might have created us all and? This answers absolutely nothing. That is what science is supposed to do! try and answer these questions. To leave it at something stupid like a higher power did it and we will never really know, is giving up.

I think it's really that simple. (sorry to rant just read the 65% of Americans think creationism should be taught in schools...)

and by the way...
creationsim and ID are merely hypotheses if even that.

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