Discovery or Ignorance: The Choice Is yours?

{qsI really don't understand creationists who try to denigrate the theory of evolution by claiming "it's just a theory." [/qs]The answer(s) is/are so obvious.1. They have absolutely no idea what they're talking about. As soon as a creationist utters this remark, you know that.2. They are engaging in deliberate deception. Because they are engaging in "semantic shifting" as they substitute the real scientific meaning of "theory" with the street definition of "SWAG" ("some wild-ass guess").OK, creationists believe they can only defend their religion by either blathering nonsense about things that they know nothing about, or by deliberately deceiving their target audience (fellow believers and those whom they wish to convert). So what does that say about their religion?

I doubt very much that he had encountered very many scientists at the power plants, if any at all. Engineers and technicians, yes, but not scientists.One thing I've found is that engineers are notoriously contemptuous of scientists and mathematicians and scoff at theory, preferring to base designs on emperical measurements. For example, when I tried to work out a formula for converting a sensor's ADC measurements to the value being measured (eg, humidity), the EE just created a 256 element array of all the possible values.In another example, a EE instructor teaching us about the delta function (take a pulse with an area of 1 and shrink the delta-time to zero, which gives you an instantaneous force of infinite amplitude with which to slam a circuit so you can calculate its response; that's called "convolution") told us with great professional pride that engineers had thought it up and had been using it for decades with great success before those bumbling theoreticians were able to catch up with them and prove it right.You should also have noticed that most of the creationist "scientists" tend to be engineers. Or "food scientists".

Facts are raw data. Raw data in and of itself has no meaning. You need some kind of conceptual model to be able to attach any kind of meaning from raw data. The term for such a conceptual model is "theory".How could you be so willfully ignorant of that? Your entire engineering career, from your first day in class to your retirement, was based totally on theories. Your entire understanding of everything in your career was based on theories. How could you still be so ignorant of what a theory is? Or of what data is?Please, please stop and learn something about science before you do your cause any more damage than you already have. Every creationist's scriptural study should include at least these three verses from the Chinese:

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31. Therefore I say: "Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.
32. When you are ignorant of the enemy but know yourself, your chances of winning or losing are equal.
33. If ignorant both of your enemy and of yourself, you are certain in every battle to be in peril."
(Scroll III (Offensive Strategy), The Art of War, Sun Tzu)

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Your enemy is real science (as opposed to your sham "true science", which I first heard fundamentalists hawk back in 1970), but you are ignorant of it. But you are also ignorant of yourself (obviously not knowing the deliberate deceptions of the fundamentalist anti-evolution movement from whom you've gotten a lot of your material; eg, trying to pretend to oppose evolution for purely scientific reasons, which was the primary deliberate deception of "creation science" when it was created in the wake of Epperson vs Arkansas, 1968, which struck down the "monkey laws" that had held sway since the mid-1920's), so in every battle you will be in peril.You want to make statements about what scientific theories are? Then first learn what theories are! You want to oppose evolution? Then first learn what evolution actually is!What does it serve your cause and your God for you to say nonsensical things about subject matter that is well-known by those whom you have chosen to oppose? Haven't you ever read what Saint Augustine had written on this subject? From my reposting of it at No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/quotes.html#AUGUSTINE (abbreviated here):

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It very often happens that there is some question as to the earth or the sky, or the other elements of this world -- respecting which one who is not a Christian has knowledge derived from most certain reasoning or observation, and it is very disgraceful and mischievous and of all things to be carefully avoided, that a Christian speaking of such matters as being according to the Christian Scriptures, should be heard by an unbeliever talking such nonsense that the unbeliever perceiving him to be as wide of the mark as east from west, can hardly restrain himself from laughing.

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And the real evil is not that a man is subjected to derision because of his error, but it is that to profane eyes, our authors (that is to say, the sacred authors) are regarded as having had such thoughts; and are also exposed to blame and scorn upon the score of ignorance, to the greatest possible misfortune of people whom we wish to save. For, in fine, these profane people happen upon a Christian busy in making mistakes on a subject which they know perfectly well; how, then, will they believe these holy books? ... It is impossible to say what vexation and sorrow prudent Christians meet with through these presumptuous and bold spirits who, taken to task one day for their silly and false opinion, and realizing themselves on the point of being convicted by men who are not obedient to the authority of our holy books, wish to defend their assertions so thoughtless, so bold, and so manifestly false. For they then commence to bring forward as a proof precisely our holy books, or again they attribute to them from memory that which seems to support their opinion, and they quote numerous passages, understanding neither the texts they quote, nor the subject about which they are making statement.

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Even some (though far too few) leading creationists offer the same warning, as did Answers in Genesis with a list of arguments that creationists should not use. As Dr. Sarfati wrote in defense of their having published that list (my reposting is at No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/quotes.html#AiG; the link back to their site is broken due to their having reorganized their site, but you may provide them the text and the citation and they should verify it) (again, abbreviated here):

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But more and more over the last few years, we have noticed tens of thousands of Christians excitedly using arguments over the Web, for instance, that are a plain embarrassment to those with scientific training. It was like watching your brother enter the ring thinking he had a killer punch, and watching him get cut to ribbons. Further, and most importantly, it had escalated to the point where it was a hindrance to soul winning, since it gave the hearers a ”legitimate’ excuse to reject Christ.

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We know of many people, outside and inside of the church, who will no longer even look at or consider the authority of the Bible in Genesis, in its history, cosmology, etc. because of bad experiences with blatant pseudo-arguments applied by enthusiasts who had been fed creationist non-arguments.

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Do you want to oppose evolution? Really oppose evolution? Then learn everything you can about it! Not the creationist caricature of it that they use to deceive themselves and to attempt to deceive everybody else. No, the real thing! You're retired now, so go back to school and study science! Real science, not just engineering. Learn what the scientific method is, what theories really are, and how theories are formed. Philosophy of science should be a good subject for you to read up on, since those questions are very much a part of that subject.In short, if you want to make real science and evolution your enemies, then you must learn everything you can about your enemies. Otherwise, you will surely fail and take your God down with you. Or is that what you are really trying to do? To drag your God down?

No, "intelligent design" is just another installment in a long line of deceptions employed by the anti-evolution movement.For a presentation at church, I outlined what "creation science" is and some of its history; I posted that outline at No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/EarlyBird.html.Basically, the anti-evolution movement really got going as a popular movement after World War One largely due to the sharp rise in the number of high school students and as their parents' reaction to the science being taught. It culminated with their victory in the Scopes Trial (1925), which also brought them public humilation and the death of their most important leader, William Jennings Bryan. Their opposition to evolution was openly religious and they were able to pass religiously-motivated "monkey laws" in four states to bar the teaching of evolution and to keep pressure on school boards and textbook publishers to suppress and exclude the teaching of evolution.Then when in 1957 Sputnik caught us with a "science gap", our nation responded by strengthening science education, which included having scientists and university professor writing textbooks. Since evolution was the cornerstone of biology (the universities were unaffected by the anti-evolution movement's "monkey laws", etc), the new biology textbooks covered evolution extensively. When Susan Epperson of Little Rock was required to teach with one of these textbooks, she realized that it would place her in violation of their "monkey law" and so she had to challenge the law. From that case, the US Supreme Court struck down the Arkansas "monkey law" finding that a subject could not be barred for purely religious reasons.In response, the anti-evolution movement sought to circumvent the courts with a deliberately designed deception, wherein they removed overtly religious references from their materials, named it "creation science" (also, "scientific creationism") and employed a number of deliberately deceptive arguments and tactics, all of which employed the same fundamental lie that their opposition to evolution "has nothing whatsoever to do with religion, but rather is for purely scientific reasons." That lie and the true nature of "creation science" was exposed in the 1980's, first with the striking down of the 1981 Arkansas "balanced treatment" law and finally with the 1987 US Supreme Court decision against its sister Louisiana law.Also during the 1980's a new movement was starting under the lead of lawyer Phillip Johnson, whose stated opposition to evolution appears to be pure "God of the Gaps" -- in an essay, he stated outright that he opposes evolution because "it leaves God with nothing to do". I admit to not having followed their early development, but after the US Supreme Court decision on the Lousiana law, creationists suddenly started using buzzwords from the ID movement and the two movements formed an alliance. It even went so far that a creationist book, "Of Pandas and People", underwent a global find-and-replace editing where every reference to "creation science" was replaced with a reference to "intelligent design". In other words, where "creation science" had been created as a game of "Hide the Bible", creationist adoption of "intelligent design" was itself a game of "Hide the Creationism".In other words, "intelligent design" is nothing more than yet another creationist deception in a long line of deceptions.Now, what I keep wondering is, why are creationists unable to employ anything but lies and deception to support and serve their religion and their "God of Truth"?

Then by all means do continue working zealously to encourage the growth and spread of atheism.When you've grown tired of shooting yourself and your god in the foot, then re-read my advice that you do something to alleviate your pig-ignorance. And you really need to.My minister cautioned me against casting pearls before swine, but I never seem to learn. But at least it annoys the pigs.Edited by dwise1, : Edited by dwise1, : Edited by dwise1, :

A bit more completely, in order to better show the importance of theory (Theodosius Dobzhansky, "Nothing in Biology Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution", American Biology Teacher 35:125-129 (March 1973), p. 129; reprinted at No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.2think.org/dobzhansky.shtml):

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Seen in the light of evolution, biology is, perhaps, intellectually the most satisfying and inspiring science. Without that light, it becomes a pile of sundry facts -- some of them interesting or curious, but making no meaningful picture as a whole.

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Illustrating that further is my summary of Dr. Eugenie Scott sharing her teaching experience in a speech (No webpage found at provided URL: http://members.aol.com/dwise1/cre_ev/quotes.html#SCOTT):

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She revealed that many colleges, especially those in the "Bible Belt", do not teach evolution to their biology students, so many degreed biologists out there have had no training in evolution. Then she related her own experiences teaching the lower-division physical anthropology course, in which she definitely did cover evolution. Every semester, a few biology seniors would enroll in her class looking for an easy A. In every such case, at some point in the semester, she would see the "ah-ha!" light suddenly come on in those students' heads as they said to themselves, "So that's why ..." Dr. Scott offered this as living confirmation of Dobzhansky's famous quote, that nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

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Edited by dwise1, : No reason given.

You've got it completely turned around.Facts are the observations of phenomena in the physical universe, raw data. Theories are the conceptual models used to explain those facts and to predict where and how to look for new facts (this being one way of testing a theory).Theories never become facts, but rather theories explain facts. Your delusion that theories somehow get promoted to the rank of Fact is a blazingly clear indication that you simply don't know what you're talking about. Learn! I've already suggested that reading up on the philosophy of science might be a good place to start.Yet again, I'll cast more pearls before swine. Here's how the scientific methods, very basically:
You observe something happening, a phenomenon.
You try to use current theories to explain it. If the current theories don't explain it or offer a very poor explanation, you investigate further. BTW, please note that even poor theories serve a useful purpose of providing a starting point in your investigation; eg, the caloric theory of heat.
You form hypotheses about the phenomenon, then you test those hypotheses.
Most of those hypotheses will fail -- actually, we should expect that none of them would succeed completely, but some of them should hopefully show some promise. You take those hypotheses that showed promise and you try to correct them, to refine them, and then you test them again.
Part of this iterative process includes coming up with new tests, with new things to look for. All of this builds a collection of evidence.As an engineer, you should have employed this procedure quite often as you would troubleshoot a problem or an odd observation.Out of the process of building and correcting and refining these hypothese, you form an explanation of the phenomenon, a conceptual model of the phenomenon, a theory -- in effect, hypotheses form a theory. It's not usually the case that a single hypothesis gets promoted to the rank of Theory, but rather that multiple bundles of hypotheses form the fabric of a theory, analogous to the threads the form a tapestry.
At first, the theory is still rough, so it undergoes an iterative process of testing, correcting, and refinement. Hypotheses get retested and corrected or replaced by new hypotheses. More scientists get involved in the process, each probing and testing the theory for its weak points, trying to break it, so that those weaknesses can be corrected and the theory improved. If far too many unfixable flaws remain and there's a competing theory that works better, then the theory is rejected in favor the that other better theory (doesn't always happen quite like that, as evidenced by the acceptance of the Copernican theory over the Ptolemic system even though the Copernican model was much less accurate, until Kepler discovered that planetary orbits are elliptical, not circular).
If the fledgling theory survives all that, then the result is an explanation of the phenomenon that has been well-tested and has a sizable body of evidence supporting it (remember that the next time you parrot "it's only a theory!").
Even if the theory still has a lot of weaknesses, if there's no theory that's any better, then it's the best that we have to explain the phenomenon. It will still give us something to work with and provide a starting-point for further research -- note that ID's "goddidit" "explanations" both explain nothing and deprive us of the ability to conduct further research. Its weaknesses will be well-known among scientists and will themselves spur other scientists on to further research trying to resolve those weaknesses or to construct their own theories.There it is in a nutshell. Now you should know better. So now go and learn it.

Or chain-species, the special case of which are ring-species (Ring species - Wikipedia). Anywhere on the chain, neighbors are able to interbreed with each other, but the ones on either end of the chain are two different species.Same with two species of gull found in one place on the Arctic Circle. Start going around the region and it's one species of bird, but by the time you return to where you had started, that one species had turned into the other one. That Wikipedia article discusses this classic case.

Oh yes, speciation clearly does occur.And as I recall, Darwin's observation of several chain species down the coast of South America helped lead him to arrive at evolution.

Since we now know that those 72 Nobel Prize winning scientists were amici curiae in the Edwards v. Aguillard case (the Louisiana "balanced-treatment" law case that in 1987 exposed to all the courts in the land that "creation science" is a religious fraud and deception), we also know that they do know what "true science" is, even if not by that specific term.Not to be confused with real science (ie, science as it's actually practiced by scientists), "true science" is a deceptive term coined by fundamentalists. While somewhat akin to that other deceptive term, "creation science", it seems to have been created more in order to deceive fellow fundamentalists in order to assuage their fears of science, whereas "creation science" was created to deceive the courts and the general public.I first encountered the term circa 1970, at the height of the "Jesus Freak" era (when 1960's hippies started converting to Christian fundamentalism and became a scourge upon the earth, proselytizing at everyone in sight), when a friend's "Jesus Freak" brother-in-law used it. At least he had the common courtesy (or was it navité?) to explain what it meant: that science which agrees "with the Bible". I put that in quotes, because in reality he was saying that "true science" is that part of science which agrees with his theology's particular interpretation of the Bible.So the main difference between real science and "true science" is that while real science is based on the evidence and driven by the desire to discover new things and to solve mysteries, "true science" is based on fundamentalist dogma and is driven by the desire to prevent mysteries from being solved (since their God-of-the-Gaps mentality equates mysteries with their god) and hence the desire to keep anything new from being discovered (unless it can be turned into useful technology; giving them flush toilets was a very slippery slope indeed).So, since those 72 Nobel Prize laureates all signed up to knowing "creation science" for the fraud that it is, I'm sure that upon inspection they would also know "true science" for the fraud that it is.

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{When you search for God, y}ou can't go to the people who believe already. They've made up their minds and want to convince you of their own personal heresy.
("The Jehovah Contract", AKA "Der Jehova-Vertrag", by Viktor Koman, 1984)Humans wrote the Bible; God wrote the world.
(from filk song "Word of God" by Dr. Catherine Faber, No webpage found at provided URL: http://www.echoschildren.org/CDlyrics/WORDGOD.HTML)Of course, if Dr. Mortimer's surmise should be correct and we are dealing with forces outside the ordinary laws of Nature, there is an end of our investigation. But we are bound to exhaust all other hypotheses before falling back upon this one.
(Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles)Gentry's case depends upon his halos remaining a mystery. Once a naturalistic explanation is discovered, his claim of a supernatural origin is washed up. So he will not give aid or support to suggestions that might resolve the mystery. Science works toward an increase in knowledge; creationism depends upon a lack of it. Science promotes the open-ended search; creationism supports giving up and looking no further. It is clear which method Gentry advocates.
("Gentry's Tiny Mystery -- Unsupported by Geology" by J. Richard Wakefield, Creation/Evolution Issue XXII, Winter 1987-1988, pp 31-32)It is a well-known fact that reality has a definite liberal bias.
Robert Colbert on NPR