Arrogance of Elitism

Hi, Mike.I can understand why many creationists would see it that way.But, I think it would help to see it from the other side's perspective, too. Like Straggler said, technical experts and dissenting laypersons are not on equal ground in relation to their grasp of the topic in question, yet the typical creationist layperson is not able to realize this.Take Buzsaw, for instance: already in this thread he is starting in on Big Bang Theory, even though the evidence for it has been expounded to him ad nauseum, yet his continued portrayal of it shows that he does not even understand what Big Bang Theory says. The same for the Laws of Thermodynamics and 4-dimensional physics.What can we say to him? Everything that possibly can be said already has been said, all to no avail. Yet, every time someone whats to discuss the Laws of Thermodynamics on EvC, they will invariably have to deal with Buzsaw, and the debate will degenerate into yet another vain attempt to explain the most basic of thermodynamics concepts to him.-----But, in further defense of the materialist bunch, I can testify that the fury of their attacks are not leveled solely at creationists: I have been attacked just as harshly and critically by the same people, even though I am "on their side." But, it’s all part of science: “survival of the fittest” works for theories just as well as it works for organisms, and “fit” theories are the ones that stand up to the most attacks without toppling.I have noticed, in my relatively short tenure as a scientist, that the average scientist tends to inadvertantly offend significantly more people in normal conversations than the average non-scientist.

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-BluejayDarwin loves you.

If anyone is an arrogant elitist it would be you Buzsaw.Your continuous message of fear and hate of anyone guilty of being born in the 'wrong' place is directly contrary to the Sermon on the Mount.Your demand that you are the judge of an individual's salvation is directly contrary to the first commandment.Your insistence that you, and only those who agree, can foresee such a nebulous thing as Biblical prophecy and no one else with any other interpretation is obviously wrong is the very definition of elitism.Your bragging about how you "instilled the fear of god" in your offspring in a thread discussing child abuse at WorldWideWord invites some unpleasant visuals. I notice when called on such a statement in that forum you seem to have run away permanently.Parts of the New Testament are a contender for the greatest story ever told. Why are you so proud of driving people away from the message contained within?Pride cometh before a fall.

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Read not to contradict and confute, not to believe and take for granted, not to find talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider - Francis BaconThe more we understand particular things, the more we understand God - Spinoza

You poor souls -- my heart bleeds for you, in that there are dissenting POVs to yours and that of the majority.You've stated it well: "Everything that possibly can be said already has been said, all to no avail."If the time comes when perhaps you can come up with a new line other than, "we don't know," when it comes to things like where all energy, matter and forces came from relative to the BBT and the LoT which says no energy is created or destroyed, then you might begin making sense to logical folks like Buzsaw. Edited by Buzsaw, : Add apostrophe

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

Lets see if we can't correct your little tirad to sound more logical...Should read..."If the time comes when perhaps the highly intelligent physicist, who are directly working on the cosmic questions, can see fit to dumb-down their theories so that lesser educated simple folk like myself can understand it...we, I, Buzsaw, would be most grateful. As for now, the science behind cosmology is way over my head. I will no longer reveal my ignorance by pretending I understand any of these theories, nor will I presume that if I can't understand it, it does not mean the theory is wrong, it just means that I need to be better educated on the subject. I sincerely hope that I have not offended any of the physicist on this site who have tried so hard to help me, and I'll retreate to my books and ask questions when needed. My apologies --Buzsaw"What do you think Buz...better?

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"All great truths begin as blasphemies""I smoke pot. If this bothers anyone, I suggest you look around at the world in which we live and shut your mouth."--Bill Hicks"I never knew there was another option other than to question everything"--Noam Chomsky

(Embolding mine for emphasis)Hi Onifre. I have quite high regard for your contributions here at EvC. I have emboldened your signature quote to say that what is considered scientifically blasphemous to today's physicist elitists may end up as truth in some tomorrow future period.When logical arguments such as I have put forth are impugned as total idiocy, having no debatable merit, I consider that as elitist arrogancy.My counterparts in the space sluggout, for example, are falsely maligning me as having no debatable points whatsoever and have not scored even a smidget of a point in the whole 10 page debate. That debate is a dandy example of elitist arrogance, imo. I was gracious enough to admit that my POV was debatable, but no; they can't so much as admit to a thing they said as debatable.They consider their POV as absolutely empirical, all the while failing to empirically refute arguments which I made relative to the properties of space, etc; topics which are debated widely on the www by various science POVs. That, imo, is snobbish elitist arrogancy.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

The PoV you hold, that of an eternal static flat universe was held previously by many including scientists. However as new evidence has come in this view has been utterly, totally and completely empirically refuted. But you won't listen to this when it is said.Your PoV is that of someone who chooses to ignore all of this evidence because it fails to fit your limited human perception and theistic beliefs (I personally don't see this contradiction but you obviously feel it strongly).You provide no answers to the questions that caused the original downfall of your view. You provide no refutation of any of the highly tested results of current theories. And yet you then insist that you have been proven correct somehow.........????? In your case I would call this stubbornness rather than arrogance but it is a thin line that divides the two........

This isn't about a "dissenting POV." It's about a lack of comprehension of basic physics.As an example: a frequent Creationist argument is that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics refutes evolution because entropy always increases in a closed system.The response, of course, is that the Earth is not a closed system - there's a rather large fusion/fission reactor pouring energy into the Earth constantly. We call it the Sun. Overall entropy for the system as a whole still increases as per the Laws of Thermodynamics, but the entropy of Earth alone is artificially decreased by the input of energy from the Sun.I don't know if you've ever used this argument, Buz, but you do tend to interject in discussions that involve the Laws of Thermodynamics and basically frustrate everyone else with your insistence that you do understand thermodynamics when your arguments indicate you do not. That's not a "different POV," that's just you arguing from a position of ignorance with an arrogant insistence that you are just as competent on the subject as, say, cavediver and Son Goku, actual physicists with degrees and everything. That's not arrogance, it's simply a fact that a person with a physics degree is likely to better understand physics than a layperson, and when the physics PhD says you aren't understanding the physics model, you just might not be understanding it as well as you think you are.You don't need a degree in these things to debate them, but when someone who has studied the subject for a good portion of their life says that you are misrepresenting something, it's simply common sense to listen to them. Perhaps not everything that can be said, but there's certainly a brick wall you carry around for us to beat our heads on. Exactly why is "we don't know" illogical?Further, do you have evidence that matter and energy were at one time created or destroyed? The Big Bang doesn't say they were. You've never, that I've seen, provided any reference to say that the Big Bang model does say that matter and energy were created.This is where the frustration comes in, Buz. You insist that a scientific model says something that it does not say, and argue from that position. It's a basic strawman based out of your lack of understanding regarding the Big Bang model.The Big Bang model says that as you look at the Universe, the dimensions of height, length and width are all smaller in the past. As you approach T=0, length, width and height also approach zero. The four dimensions are intimately tied together in this way, in the same way that time and the spacial dimensions are tied with regard to the speed of light (see time dialation and general relativity). Because the volume of teh Universe was smaller in the past and the amount of energy and matter in the Universe were constant (becasue matter and energy cannot be created or destroyed), the mass/energy density of teh universe was much greater, resulting in many things including increased temperature. The closer you get to T=0, the smaller, hotter, and more dense the Universe is. As you approach T=0, the volume also approaches 0, meaning that the density and resultant heat approach the infinite. Current models of the Universe that extrapolate these properties forward in time from T=0 result in a Universe that looks rather like ours does. Models like this have successfully predicted the existence of the COsmic Microwave Background, which is basically the leftover heat of the entire Universe from when the whole thing was so hot and dense. Predictions made by the Big Bang model have proven to be highly accurate.At no point in time did the mass/energy of teh universe not exist. There was no violation of Thermodynamics. All of the models in fact depend on the mass/energy of the Universe remaining constant, because that's what causes the density and thus heat to increase as the volume shrinks closer to T=0.Only Creationists interpret the Big Bang to mean Creation ex nihilo. It's projection of your own beliefs, not an actual representation of the science. No cosmologist claims that the Big Bang created mass and energy ex nihilo.If you want to discuss this, feel free to make a new thread out of it. If you do so, and you insist that the Big Bang does involve the creation of the mass/energy of the Universe, you'll need to point out the specific point in time at which the mass/energy did not exist. If you want to question where the Universe itself comes from, we simpy have insufficient data to make any comment. It may simply exist on its own, it may be the result of other natural processes in some greater multiverse, it may have had a Creator, we simply don't know. And it's not illogical to admit as much.

Hi, Buzz. This is exactly what I'm talking about. We're not going to turn this into a BBT/LoT debate thread, like all the others, but I can count three instances in this sentence alone where you are making incorrect connections between things scientists on this forum have said, completely misunderstood what it is that a scientific theory is meant to be explaining, or otherwise misused what has been said to you.Yet, you continue to assert that your opinion deserves to be heard. You're up against some of the experts in the field, arguing that they don't know what they're talking about simply because you don't know what they're talking about.Then, evolutionists and scientists get labeled as elitist or arrogant because they no longer have any optimism for a decent conversation with you. The most cynical and arrogant people, I've found, are the ones who've had the most contact with the person towards whom they're being cynical or arrogant.-----In short, I would advise people not to jump to the conclusion that somebody else is arrogant or condescending or elitist: I'd say that, perhaps 7-8 out of 10 times, the person being patronized is as much the reason for it as the person doing the patronizing.There are people in this world that can only be dealt with by saying, "that's just the way it is" (sometimes you even have to add, "you stupid, ignorant puck"), because they simply cannot or will not understand the explanation for it.

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-BluejayDarwin loves you.

I thank you sir. Well, considering that people like cavediver or straggler are just simply trying to explain laws of physics to you, I don't think that would qualify them as being blasphemous. Perhaps you just aren't grasping the physics behind what they are explaining, or maybe you're just conceptualizing it incorrectly. I have read, and stayed with, your entire 10 page thread. From an outside perspective you just don't seem to understand what everyone was trying to explain to you and held to some pretty wrong ideas about space. Even if that were so, it does not change the fact that your theory is incorrect in it's concept of how spacetime works. If your only argument is that they should have been more gentle, I can assure you you will get no sympathy fom me. Showing bullheaded ignorance does not say much for you either Buz. Yes Buz but it's not their PoV, you see thats where you're confussing things a bit. What they are explaining pertains to General Relativity, GR is a law of physics. I am currently a first year physics student, so trust me I understand that the information is overwhelming. But, there is nothing wrong in admiting ones limits in any field of study. We are not born knowing therefore no one is expected to just know everything. If you showed some humility on the subject of physics and GR, perhaps they would be less arrogant, then again maybe not, but at least you'd have a better grasp of the physics behind spacetime.Just my humble opinion...

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"All great truths begin as blasphemies""I smoke pot. If this bothers anyone, I suggest you look around at the world in which we live and shut your mouth."--Bill Hicks"I never knew there was another option other than to question everything"--Noam Chomsky

It appears that you are misreading me. If you read carefully, hopefully you will see that I was saying that what physicist elitists consider as scientifically blasphemous i.e. not scientific, may be found to be truth in the future.

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BUZSAW B 4 U 2 C Y BUZ SAW.
The immeasurable present eternally extends the infinite past and infinitely consumes the eternal future.

Buzsaw writes:

quote:

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I was saying that what physicist elitists consider as scientifically blasphemous i.e. not scientific, may be found to be truth in the future.

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But that's the way science works: You show your evidence that indicates what we thought was true wasn't and then they give you the Nobel Prize. Every scientist dreams of the Big Discovery (C) that overturns everything. They'll name it after you.But notice the important point: You have to show your evidence. You have to define your terms, describe your experiment, detail your process, and analyze the results. It's not enough to simply assert that your proclamation is "logical."That's why we ask you specific questions: To get you to show your work. That's why the OP is such a caricature with no basis in reality.

Ok. Then my reponse would be that the reason they consider it blasphemous is because you are attemting to overturn laws in physics with nothing more than assertions about space. Hence their feelings of contempt towards you.Original blasphemy was the disagreement with alegations about the nature of the world. The laws in physics are NOT alegations, they are tried and tested and confirmed to be Laws in nature. To go against these laws does not make you out to be an intellectual rebel of sorts like Galileo for example, it makes you look ignorant because you are only confussing what you think you understand about spacetime.But we live to battle another day and I'll look forward to you defending, or rather trying to defend, your definition of sTrAiGhT again.

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"All great truths begin as blasphemies""I smoke pot. If this bothers anyone, I suggest you look around at the world in which we live and shut your mouth."--Bill Hicks"I never knew there was another option other than to question everything"--Noam Chomsky

Exactly.Even worse is spontaneous generation. As far as I am concerned, the claim of abiogenesis is equal to stating that a rock can sprout feelers.

Both you and Buz have the silly habit of using the term "illogical" to describe anything that you are personally incredulous of.Personal incredulity is not a valid argument. Even when you erroneously call it "logic".

Poisoning the well is illogical.A person's knowledge of a subject is irrelevant to an argument, according to logic.In the battle between evolution and creation for example, you can have an expert scientist versus a man off the street, and if the argument is over the truth then the man on the street can win, if he is more logical and perceptive.When it comes to information about evolution, the expert will know more, but this is ABSOLUTELY IRRELEVANT to the truth-value of evolution.Example; an expert in Harry Potter, who can recite nay information on it, versus a man who only knows the name, "Harry Potter". Does this mean that the expert is correct, that Harry Potter isn't fiction?Not at all.Really guys, if you are so smart, please show some evidence because at the moment, mikey is yet again doing a number on you.