Martin
How about a supernatural aspect of a creation that has nothing to do with the myth of evolution? Evolution is not science.
Ok.Let us speak of the "supernatural" aspect of creation.Exactly what do
you percieve the "supernatural" to be? Are we to speak of the God of the Bible as being supernatural? In what way would you say he is supernatural and what level of certainty do you assign to this? Why? It has been my impression that faith or belief is an easy phrase to trot out and yet when pressed for explanation I am asked to trust that you or others are not fooling yourselves and that you are genuine?
I will try yet again to bring this issue to the table.How do you explain the
mechanism by which the "supernatural is accomplished and what is the evidence for such? What do you mean by creation. The common thread that I percieve is that creation was accomplished by a "being",God,by means that require the use of inexplicable ability,for instance,{Gen 1:3} "And God said, Let there be light: and there was light." Here in this instance the author is of the impression that God spoke [vocal capabilities in an entity that is incorporeal?] and this allowed the phenomena of [I assume] visible light. Ignoring the fact that this is in direct conflict with the Big Bang theory[but that is only science after all]
we wonder how the mere speaking of a phrase with no one around to hear{and no medium in which for sound to transmit} makes for all the properties of light such as interference, diffraction, reflection, refraction, quantum entanglement etc,etc.
On now to your statement that evolution is not science. Please inform us of how you back up this statement by showing how you would explain the enormous body of evidence from dozens of different scientific disciplines that all agree on the establishment of evolution as the best avalable form of reasoning for bringing the expeimental and observational data into cohesion and clarity. Show us the creationist model that
better predicts events that we can monitor that show actual evolution taking place. What is the creationists theory behind the ability of viruses to adapt to antibiotics? How do you explain the existence of fish at ocean depths that possess fully formed eyes that are nonetheless blind?
Do you have evidence? Can you demonstrate it?
Please understand that these are not unfair or harrassing questions. These are the meat of scientific inquiry. Science is its own best critic.As an ending to this I am going to include this little excerpt from the book, "surely your joking Mr. Feynman."
We have learned a lot from experience about how to handle some of the ways we fool ourselves. One example: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It's a little bit off, because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It's interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of the electron, after Millikan. If
you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bigger than Millikan's, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, and the next one's a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher.
Why didn't they discover that the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of -- this history - because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong -- and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number closer to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they
eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that. We've learned those tricks nowadays, and now we don't have that kind of a disease.But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves -- of having utter scientific integrity -- is, I'm sorry to say, something that we
haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.
I would like to add something that's not essential to the science, but something I kind of believe, which is that you should not fool the layman when you're talking as a scientist. I am not trying to tell you what to do about cheating on your wife, or fooling your girlfriend, or something like that, when you're not trying to be a scientist, but just trying to be an ordinary human being. We'll leave those problems up to you and your rabbi.
I'm talking about a specific, extra type of integrity that is not lying, but bending over backwards to show how you're maybe wrong, that you ought to have when acting as a scientist. And this is our responsibility as scientists, certainly to other scientists, and I think to laymen.
[This message has been edited by sidelined, 12-07-2003]
[This message has been edited by sidelined, 12-07-2003]
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