Even Better Reading for Non-Weenies

I'm catching up on my podcasts, listening to NPR in the background...
Apparently, researchers, scientists and entrepreneurs have recently
extracted ancient yeast spores (captured in amber) and are making a
new type of beer out of it.

http://www.fossilfuelsbrewingco.com/

First, you got to like the Company name. Very cool.
I've not tried it yet (and will probably make sure other drinkers
don't turn into "Bruneldfly" first).

For those of your who believe the world is only 6,000 years old (Sarah
Palin?), this Bud's probably NOT for you!

-mpm

 

Well now, if God really did create everything, and he chose to make it
APPEAR to be billions of years old, how would we go about detecting the
subterfuge?

Picture God, in the void, 6700 years ago, playing with something like
this: http://tinyurl.com/3vfq4a . He's got a vial labeled "Carbon 14",
one labeled "Carbon 13", and one labeled "Carbon 12". He can mix them
up in any ratio he wants to. Then he can use that carbon to make an
interesting fossil (with or without transitional forms, depending on his
whim at the moment) and stuff it into a geological stratum that matches
what the radiocarbon dating would say.

Ice cores, K-T boundary iridium levels, entrapped atmospheric gas
ratios, all the details pointing to the same number. But MADE that way.

The creator God, as posited, is infinitely powerful. So any test we
invent, he's already figured out and planned for the results to come out
a certain way. I'm not saying that's how it is, but how would we KNOW?

 

And if she was being that careful, why would we bother knowing?

If she is prepared to go to all that trouble to let us believe in a
4.5 billion year old earth, only the most disrespectful god-botherer
would go to the trouble of believing anything different.

After all, the book that Sarah Palin and her ilk use to justify their
eccentric chronology may have been written by God, but God wasn't too
careful in her choice of printers and publishers, because it is
crawling with self-contradictions, whereas the book God wrote in the
fossil record seems to be remarkable self-consistent, if a little
harder to read.

 

The Omphalos Hypothesis.
In other words, a totally useless conjecture.

--
Dirk

http://www.transcendence.me.uk/ - Transcendence UK
http://www.theconsensus.org/ - A UK political party
http://www.onetribe.me.uk/wordpress/?cat=5 - Our podcasts on weird stuff

 

Liberals have their religion too....

Global warming

Communism (my Gosh, how come the deaths of 100 million people don't
seem to deter liberals from socialism ----> which leads to ------>
communism?

The religious belief that we can NOT get oil and somehow magical
energy beams will show up at our doorstep to power our cars.

Vegetarianism

Mother Earth planet worship

and evolution comes packed with dogmas and philisophical conclusions
too)


Christians lay out their issues of dogma and faith and label them for
what they are. Liberals take their religion and call it "Science".

Never yet met a Christian that denies the principles and laws of
electricity, physics, chemistry, mechanics.

Its only the so called "sciences" that can't be proven and have all
kinds of political ramifications attached to their acceptance that the
Christians reject.

 

You left out medicine, (a science), which by itself disproves what you
just claimed.

 

Why would he bother? He'd cover up the facts that prove the existance
of him, when that is what he (appears) to want? In that case, I'd
think he were some kind of idiot.

 

On the other hand, that would explain a lot of things happening on this planet

M

 

Hey, let's face it - given the laws of physics, etc., that came out
of the Big Bang, evolution is the only intelligent way to design a
Universe. ;-)

Cheers!
Rich

 

God doesn't have to be a liar; he just has to have some plan that's
beyond our comprehension. Science describes our universe based on
observations and a rigorous set of rules for interpreting those
observations.

Science doesn't actually say what's "real", because (insert lengthy
philosophical rant of your choice on the meaning of "real" here).
Science describes a view of reality and the universe that has the
highest achievable level of internal consistency.

If our observations lack detail, our conclusions may be out of step with
"reality" (see above). For instance, the universe used to rotate around
the earth. Later, more detailed observations showed plainly that it
rotated around the sun. We now "know" that if the universe rotates at
all, the center of rotation is... well, someplace really way farther
away than that.

Nowadays we see the earth as being billions of years old. That's
certainly what it looks like to Science. It could have been built 6000
years ago, or ten seconds ago, or (as some claim) last Thursday. But it
LOOKS billions of years old. Why? Maybe because it IS billions of
years old. Or maybe because it LOOKS billions of years old to our
current Science. Future Scientific discoveries may revise that figure.

My point is simply this: Science is a closed system. It's expandable,
but it remains closed. Science is closed in that it only deals with
concepts that can be expressed scientifically, are testable, and are
falsifiable. Not all concepts meet those criteria. That doesn't make
them worthless, it just makes them scientifically irrelevant.

Occam's Razor proves nothing and disproves nothing. I looked it up.

 

Still makes it a liar. It also means that god has a morality different
from the one it wants to impose on us. It makes gods irrelevant to humans.

JS

 

Ignornt idiots who can't follow the tolerably complicated science
involved do claim that that global warming is a religious dogma. It
isn't, but educating idiots is difficult and not all that rewarding.

Socialism predates communism, which split off from mainstream
socialism sometime in the 1870's - communists believed in the "leading
role of the party" which regular socialists prophetically rejected as
a form of tyrannical oligarchy. Democratic socialism is alive and well
in Western Europe, and doesn't show any sign of evolving into a new
communism.

In fact there is a rational belief that oil is going to get more
expensive as we run through the easily extracted stuff and have to
rely on less accessible sources like oil shales, to the point where
electric cars are going to become popular. It would help if we managed
to develop a somewhat more magical battery technology than the ones
we've found so far, but the technology we've got would do an adequate
job.

Isn't a religion, and is perfectly practical. Veganism - which rejects
dairy products - is a lot less practicable, but happily it is confined
to the lunatic fringe.

Strawman, Have you ever heard of a Mother Earth planet worshipper
anywhere but in a right-wig denunciation?

Such as?

Christians aren't in the habit of publishing papers in peer-reviewed
journals pointing out that various aspects of their faith are wrong or
inadequate and proposing better alternative dogmas, Science isn't a
religion and religions would look very odd if they adopted the
scientific method of establshing their dogmas.

Well the Pope has finally got around to saying that Gallileo hadn't
got it wrong, but it took the Catholic Church some three hundred years
to get that far.

According to Popper, scientific ideas can't be absolutely proven - the
best that science can claim is that their current theory hasn't been
falsified yet. Because Christians believe that God told them stuff,
they do think that they can declare some theories to be true - that
was the logic that the Catholic Church used to declare Gallileo's
ideas heretical - so you don't seem to know much about the subject.

 

Internally:
http://www.godchannel.com

Cheers!
Rich

 

Did you try any of the experiments, or did you just pooh-pooh the whole
site, having decided that you're wiser than God herself?

Thanks,
Rich

 

The sort of religious nitwits who believe that God is an omniscient
Intellignet Designer never seem to be able to explain what she had in mind
when she designed the vagus nerve of the giraffe, which runs all the way up
the neck and back down again - some fiftenn feet - to connect two points
that are quite close together in the upper thorax.

It is routed the same way in all mammals but this doesn't usually present a
problem, except to people who make claims about an all-wise creator.

 

This is typical rhetoric from the "scientific" crowd who hide their
beliefs behind a lab jacket. Fact is that there are way too many
variables in global weather for anyone to claim knowledge.

Why don't we hear about the ozone layer dissapearing anymore? How
about acid rain? Remember in the 70's it was global cooling that was
going to do us in. All these predicted catastrophies by "scientific"
individuals are now all forgoten. I guess we don't hear about them
anymore because

1. The political agenda attached to these doomsday predictions were
accomplished

2. They became too hard to defend, so they just kind of melted away.

Here is a list of complete idiots for you to peruse:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...tream_scientific_assessment_of_global_warming

If oil gets more expensive because the market cannot deliver it, then
so be it. I have a problem with oil becoming more expensive because
liberal politicians feel it needs to be more expensive (of course
because of global warming) . They therefore limit the drilling of oil
- all to save the planet of course (They are such noble people).


Brent

 

Looks like you are smarter than God.

Brent

 

I'm clearly smarter than whatever designed the routing of the vagus
nerve in the neck of the giraffe - since it obviously wasn't designed,
but evolved - and I'm certainly better-informed than anybody who
believes Intelligent Design is a scientific theory that might be
taught as an alternative to Darwinian Evolution.

 

Buleg finds that "there are way too many variables in global weather
for anyone to claim knowledge." The world's best climatologists have a
different opinion.

I think I'll go with the climatologists - Buleg isn't a name that
appears in the peer-reviewed literature on the subject.

We've vastly reduced the amount of ozone-destroying fluorcarbons being
injected into the atmosphere, and the ozone holes are shrinking.
Problem solved.

Coal burning power stations now have scrubbers in their smoke stacks
to take out the sulphur dioxide that was causing the acid rain.
Problem solved.

It wasn't global cooling, but North Atlantic cooling. There are still
anxieties about the Gulf Stream - if the Greenland ice-cap melts too
fast, the extra fresh water pouring into the North Atlantic could turn
off the Gulf Stream and make the Northern atlantic and the surrounding
countries a lot cooler for a while. Since the 1970's the Gulf Stream
has been examined in some detail and while it has slowed down a bit,
there doesn't seem to be any immediate risk that it will turn off
completely and bring on an Even Younger Dryas

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Younger_Dryas.

You don't hear about them any more because you are the kind of ill-
informed twit who doesn't listen in the right places.

<snip>

 

Yeah, I felt the same way the first time I looked at a PCB layout that
had a bunch of traces that would connect to ground on one end, wander
around the board aimlessly for a while, and then just stop.*

Turns out there were very good reasons for that, I just wasn't smart
enough at the time to see them. So I was sure I could have done a
better board layout than _that_ guy.

I'm with you on the concept that Intelligent Design Theory is pretty
ridiculous. The problem is that "theory" is a scientific term, and all
the evidence for an Intelligent Creator is unscientific. The ID'ers
just trying to shoehorn their religious beliefs into a science
classroom. I'm entertained by how transparently silly the arguments are
on both sides.

=====
*My apologies for dragging this thread somewhat closer to the group
charter. I'll try not to let it happen again.