Meert / Brown Debate

I took one of the quotes Trixie had and put it into Google:

quote:

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Other bent rocks are small enough to hold in one’s hand. How could brittle rock, showing little evidence of heating or cracking, fold? Rocks are strong in compression but weak in tension. Therefore, their stretched outer surfaces should easily fracture.

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Very first link? Walt Brown's webpage. You're obviously in error.

That wasn't a quote, though. That was simply a summary of some of Walt's statements.Everybody seems to have understood that but you. What's the deal?Your first two posts here haven't exactly knocked 'em out of the park. Why don't you try a little more well-researched argument and a little less "you're an idiot"?

You're not the first computer programmer I've met with wierd ideas about the world.Maybe working with computers skews your perspective until you come to believe that the entire universe operates like a computer. I dunno. But heed: the universe doesn't operate like a computer. There's limits to what can be known, not the least of which is the uncertainty principle. Science seeks the close-enough model because that's all we can ever have. We don't stop there, of course - science is a process of continually improving models - but you'd have to be an idiot to conclude that, since we don't know everything, we don't know anything.I can appreciate that you find the fuzziness of real-world models disconcerting. But you'd better get used to it, especially in the biological sciences. Yeah, yeah. They laughed at Einstein. But they also laughed at Bozo the clown.Come to think of it they didn't laugh at Einstein.The point is, only an idiot considers departure from the dominant paradigm as evidence of correctness. We don't reject creationism because it's different than what we learned in Bio 101. We reject it because the evidence proves it wrong.

But presumably you've seen earthquakes on TV, right? And volcanoes and stuff?Presumably you've looked at a map, and observed how South America and Africa fit together, or would, if there wasn't a lot of ocean in the way?Presumably you know what GPS is, right? So presumably you would trust the results when GPS data confirms that the land we stand on moves?If you want to see a fault, look at this one in California:
{Rescaled photo to "100%", which fits the normal page width for my browser, if not Percy's - Adminnemooseus}You're telling me you've never seen a picture of the San Andreas fault? If there's a top ten list of visually distinctive geological features, this one has to be on it.This message has been edited by Adminnemooseus, 05-27-2004 02:13 AM

One more thing: if you're then what was the purpose of this little analogy: Now, I don't think I'm the only one here who thought your intent was to say "close enough isn't good enough; it has to be perfect." Now you're all like "I'm not saying it has to be perfect", when it's obvious that was exactly what you were saying. What gives?

What you have yet to grasp is that it's stupid to be so open-minded your brains fall out.At some point, no matter how open-minded you are, if you want to know the truth, you have to eliminate untruth.That requires closing your mind to what you can conclude is untrue. Once you've done that, there's only one thing left - the truth.Now, you shouldn't be so closed-minded that you don't re-examine your beliefs in the presence of new observation. But you don't simply re-examine your beliefs just because some internet yahoo told you to. You haven't presented anything new. You're just trying to make me out to be close-minded simply because I've done what you haven't yet - examined the facts and eliminated the untruths.Look, we don't re-try trials just because some jackoff walks into the courtroom and says "Tim McVeigh wasnt guilty! Don't be close-minded, try him again!" I've assessed the evidence to the best of my ability, and rejected creationism and ID as untrue.I'll assess them again if you have new evidence, but I'm not going to waste my time doing it just because you want me to. You may consider that a closed mind - but the only rational position is to be close-minded to untruth. Anything else is insanity.