I agree, in the end, for the individual, this is the only truth there is. Fortunately, we have universal senses that intertwine with other "realities" of other individuals. This matrix of individual "realities" is known as the physical universe.
The ordinances of human nature and the employment of the five senses are similar, sometimes identical. This is a universal compass, because of the similarities of the senses, that causes the physical universe to appear similar, if not the same, to everyone that participates in the collective equitable matrix.
The word "theory" comes into play as suggestive material to help explain and examine scientific phenomena. Originally, the word theory was used to describe suggestive ideas to assist in explanation through examining the facts. through observations the theory progresses to fact if substantial evidence is found to prove every aspect of the theory. source; http://www.hydroponicsearch.com/...database-!/strategy-exact
Since then, the word has, apparently, branched out to incorporate other degrees of speculation as well, for the sake of science. My good friend, coyote, offered up this definition from nasa.
coyote writes:
Theory: a well-substantiated explanation of some aspect of the natural world; an organized system of accepted knowledge that applies in a variety of circumstances to explain a specific set of phenomena; theories can incorporate facts and laws and tested hypotheses. Theories do not grow up to be laws. Theories explain laws.
Theory: A scientifically testable general principle or body of principles offered to explain observed phenomena. In scientific usage, a theory is distinct from a hypothesis (or conjecture) that is proposed to explain previously observed phenomena. For a hypothesis to rise to the level of theory, it must predict the existence of new phenomena that are subsequently observed. A theory can be overturned if new phenomena are observed that directly contradict the theory. Source
When a scientific theory has a long history of being supported by verifiable evidence, it is appropriate to speak about "acceptance" of (not "belief" in) the theory; or we can say that we have "confidence" (not "faith") in the theory. It is the dependence on verifiable data and the capability of testing that distinguish scientific theories from matters of faith.
Wikipedia chimes in a correlating 'theory' on what a 'theory' is.
wiki writes:
The word theory has many distinct meanings in different fields of knowledge, depending on their methodologies and the context of discussion. Definitively speaking, a theory is the analysis of a set of facts in their relation to one another.[1] Additionally, in contrast with a theorem the statement of the theory is generally accepted only in some tentative fashion as opposed to regarding it as having been conclusively established. This may merely indicate, as it does in the sciences, that the theory was arrived at using potentially faulty inferences (scientific induction) as opposed to the necessary inferences used in mathematical proofs. In these cases the term theory does not suggest a low confidence in the claim and many uses of the term in the sciences require just the opposite.
and from Websters edition from 1913, to illustrate the contrast.
1913 Websters writes:
Theory \The"o*ry\, n.; pl. {Theories}. orie, L. theoria, Gr. ? a beholding, spectacle, contemplation, speculation, fr. ? a spectator, ? to see, view. See {Theater}. 1. A doctrine, or scheme of things, which terminates in speculation or contemplation, without a view to practice; hypothesis; speculation. 2. An exposition of the general or abstract principles of any science; as, the theory of music. 3. The science, as distinguished from the art; as, the theory and practice of medicine. 4. The philosophical explanation of phenomena, either physical or moral; as, Lavoisier's theory of combustion; Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments. Syn: Hypothesis, speculation.
Usage: {Theory}, {Hypothesis}. A theory is a scheme of the relations subsisting between the parts of a systematic whole; an hypothesis is a tentative conjecture respecting a cause of phenomena.
As is abundantly obvious, theory can, theoretically, mean what you want it to mean to be able to further interests, as the term has changed meaning, substantially, to outlaw initial theoretical values.
Most would say, a theory is, universally, an attempt to explain phenomena with examinations of progressive, objective observations and explanatory support. By acclamation of the very word would require a stance of manifested explanation in observation to further support, without regard to interest.
"What is a theory?" is the best place to discuss what theories are. I apply theory the way I understand it.
As it is, my drawings of this definitions were self devised. Although, I am a big fan of Dr. Hovind. I think somewhere in the middle of the creation material, the propensities just stuck. Actually, Wikipedia was my source for the definitions, I think I put that in there.
I have removed your posting permissions in this forum, the [forum=-12] forum. That means you can no longer post to this thread. I will restore your permissions after you post assurances to me in the Report discussion problems here: No.2 thread that will you stay on topic in this thread.
That depends what you mean by "on their own". In a sense, they have a "host" in the lab too. That is, they have an arrangement of material things that deliver the chemistry required to carry on the various physiologic processes that we define as being alive. What human or other living tissue assuredly does not need is to be associated with an entity that has the breath of life as I think you would define it. Or more correctly, I guess, demure from defining it.
Do you have any information to offer on the nature of the life that you believe God breathed into the hardware portion of the first man? Was it molecular in nature? If not, why weren't the workings working already? What is in those cells now that wasn't then? What did they lack that an umpteenth generation clone of human tissue in a test tube has?
Doesn't seem like it could be a soul or spirit, unless you think bacteria have souls.
Say you could do a brain transplant. The recipient heart is ticking and the body's cells are cellulatin' the whole time. The donor brain is from a real bad sinner who has rejected the entreaties of the Holy Spirit. Do the sins come with the brain? Then what about the rest of the body? If the life, the person, the sinner resides in the incoming brain, was the recipient body alive during the period of time the old brain was gone and before the new one went in? If yes, who was it during that brain-free time? Is the resulting composite a sinner? How did the sinner spread from the brain into the rest of the body?
The formula you are looking for is; correlating observations/suggestive evidence in favor of creation (+supernatural revelation or intervention) -----> belief in creation.
Only choosing evidence that is suggestive of a preferred view is call Confirmation Bias. Thinking that information that contradicts your preferred views is false or irrelevant is called Cognitive Dissonance.
It is amusingly easy to find "evidence" of a young earth in one that is very old, as all one needs to do is concentrate on things that are less than the age you want the earth to be. The problem is that you can do this for any age under the actual (factual, TRUE) age of the earth.
For instance one can go to Hawaii and measure the age of fresh lava, and then use that to argue that the earth is 1 day old.
In reality all you have determined is a bottom limit for the age of the earth with any such test: the actual (factual, TRUE) age of the earth is logically older than all measurements of age of the earth, because those are measurements of parts of the earth that may or may not be the oldest.
It is conversely interestingly difficult to find evidence of an old earth in one that is young.
For instance it is extremely difficult to find evidence of an earth older than 6 billion years, as this is before the mass that became the earth solidified.
This is, after all, how we know that the age of life on earth is between 3.5 and 4.5 billion years old: we have evidence of life at 3.5 billion years ago, we do not have evidence of life at 4.5 billion years ago. The logical conclusion is that life began on this planet some time in between.
Another 'thorn in the side', is this "attacking science" bit. If believing in creation, or believing it to be practical, is not considered "science", fine. It doesn't have to be, to you.
Science does not include contradicted concepts in what is known and understood about the reality of the universe, the earth, life, and objective reality. If you ignore contradictions then you are not practicing science no matter how you "feel" about it.
If you are truly interested in the origin of life, then there is a lot to learn, a lot of things to investigate, a lot of concepts to test, but to truly search for the answer you need to use an open-minded skeptical approach.
Say you could do a brain transplant. The recipient heart is ticking and the body's cells are cellulatin' the whole time. The donor brain is from a real bad sinner who has rejected the entreaties of the Holy Spirit. Do the sins come with the brain? Then what about the rest of the body? If the life, the person, the sinner resides in the incoming brain, was the recipient body alive during the period of time the old brain was gone and before the new one went in? If yes, who was it during that brain-free time? Is the resulting composite a sinner? How did the sinner spread from the brain into the rest of the body?
Whoa... You're weird.
Welcome to EvC. I like your avatar picture!
I'll be reading your posts.
Do the sins come with the brain?
I'd speculate that they do, in that they come along with the sentience and consciousness.
Then what about the rest of the body? If the life, the person, the sinner resides in the incoming brain, was the recipient body alive during the period of time the old brain was gone and before the new one went in?
My position is that without a sentient and conscious ability, an entity cannot sin.
So what exactly was transferred to the physical form?
ICANT must be talking about an eternal life that presumably requires God to exist.
Assuming that, I'd speculate that the transferred requirement is sentience and consciousness (the "breath of life")
All the chemistry going on in our bodies (and in the bodies of newts, monkeys, bacteria, etc.) seems to work pretty much along the same lines as chemistry does outside those bodies.
I get someone seeing sentience and consciousness as something unique to humans that requires that 'something else going on' (the transferred requirement) that doesn't happen outside our bodies (including newts, monkeys, bacteria, etc.). Not that it has been thoroughly established, but that I get someone seeing that.
Was he adding electrons? Atoms? What exactly?
Obviously I'm going with the whole sentience and consciousness thing here.....
I have noticed that some chunks of body stay alive when they are moved to a different body, even to a body of a different species in many cases. Hell, some living parts keep on living in lab environments. What is it that moves around with that chunk of liver that keeps it alive, and if you pull the plug in the lab, how does the life know to go away?
We've gotten back around again so I'll stop for now.
My short answer:
The logical outcome is that the soul relies on the body for existence here.
Wow, after a re-read, I think I've missed something.
You threw me off with the whole 'where did sin enter the equation' question because I don't think that "newts, monkeys, bacteria, etc." can sin.
But they're alive...right?
Oh yeah, God didn't give them the "breath of life".
Hi there! It's a quite enlightning experience to browse this topic and all the other ones on the forum. I'd like to add that i'm french, so my english is far from perfect. But that doesn't keep me from wanting to participate in the debate, at least at a philosophical level, since my scientific education is way below what's required to give impressive figures, references, names, etc. I do my best to learn. i also must add that the evolution theory , for now is winning my trust and my humble capacity of judgment.
until my first coming here, i've been arguing about Darwin, Mendel, Lamarck, Linneus, Gould, Hitler/Mao/Staline(...! i know it's ridiculous but sometimes you gotta answer...), mutation (point, reverse, sickle cell, bacteria, etc), genuses and taxonomy, extinct species, dinosaurs, ken ham's "answers in genesis" and creation museum, ken miller's post-dover-trial exposé, including the primate/man similarity, and other things worth the reading , the hearing and the viewing.
i hope i will find more sources of wisdom and openness here than i could until now.
Bienvenue to the forum. Don't worry about your English, it looks fine. (We'll just imagine the accent...) There are a lot of non-native English-speakers here, myself included.
And don't worry about being a layperson in scientific matters, most of us here are.
Enjoy the discussions.
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge: it is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin.
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Post away, but be sure to include your evidence and your sources.
No. millions of scientists, if there even are that many, and to which ones believe in the theory, have a theory I do not follow about the age of the earth, as well as other things.
I repeat: do you think millions of scientists know squat, while you know the truth?
Or do you just admit that you reject their knowledge in favor of your pet belief without any concern for it being true\valid\reality?
Trust me, there are millions, if not billions, of people out there out there that stand neutral to such things, like me, and require evidence for it.
The appeal to popularity is a logical fallacy: a concept is true or false, independent of how many people think it is true.
... and it has been agreed, amongst the creationist community, this is so and that the radiometric dating practice doesn't work.
Strangely science is not dependent on people agreeing with it, it is dependent on the evidence agreeing with it. Creationists agreeing among themselves that it doesn't work is just an example of confirmation bias, not of open-minded skepticism or the rational evaluation of evidence.
"My opinion doesn't effect reality", hmmm, that's good. For a moment I thought this was the twilight zone. No, my opinion doesn't effect reality, neither does the opinion of you or "millions of scientists".
Correct, and this is why science is based on agreement with evidence rather than on opinion. Opinion as a source of truth was discarded centuries ago, except perhaps by creationists?
I will go ahead and continue to believe it's not credible.
Strangely denial does not make the evidence go away, nor does it invalidate the science. You could try a christian resource:
Again, later I will post on why radiometric dating is crap (even though there is enough material on it to be placed on a new thread), and attempt to answer some of these correlations.
And the probability is very high that it has already been posted and refuted on the above threads.
The reality is you don't know that, you think that. just like I think the earth and life is about 6,000 years old.
Wrong. I know it is older than 6000 years. Precisely how old (4.5 billion to 4.6 billion) is irrelevant to the fact that parts of this earth are over 6000 years old, and thus the earth as a whole must be older.
I love this guy. There are also "cracks" at some radiometric dating.
This guy is a fraud, a con, a huckster, a liar. Talk about omissions.
He has a bachelor degree in chemistry. Not biology, not physics, not geology, yet he thinks wearing a lab coat makes him an authority.
He was also an auto mechanic for 10 years. The rest of his resume is selling lies to gullible wanna-believers.
I will later post on why radiometric dating is crap.
You keep saying this, as if repetition will enhance your position. Curiously the only thing that will enhance your position is demonstrating the problems on any one of the already available thread.
I'll tackle more tonight, as the topic is the source of life (something a chemist might have input on), not on reliability of age measurements and who is your favorite liar.
I'll take that as a compliment. The avatar shot was taken heading up Malaspina Strait off the east coast of Texada Island on a breezy day. I hope you don't come to regret that last sentence, although since my life does not revolve around a computer there will probably not be too much to read.
I won't respond in detail to your post, since I think we are pretty much on the same page. My questions were clearly rhetorical, tossed out in the hope that ICANT will attempt to address the question of physiology and consciousness. I see no need for a ghost to be injected into the machine, and think that those who claim there is one should be able to explain how it fits into the body as we understand it - with due regard to the sliding scale of sentience we see in different organisms. What, for example, do we see in the life of a chimp or a slug that would lead us to conclude they don't have a soul?
It is my understanding that there is a great deal of evidence linking the brain and consciousness. Since the brain operates using the same kind of physiology/biochemistry/chemistry/physics as the rest of the body, and since that p/b/c/p doesn't appear to need a crank start to make it work in or out of a body, I see no reason to accept that "something" was added to the machine to make it alive.
I should say that I have no problem with religious faith, properly identified as such, and kept in a dank, heavily barred room.
My late and much lamented friend Barry Beyerstein did a brief review of the literature on the subject of the brain and consciousness a few years back which might be an interesting read for someone like ICANT. It is easily Googled.
No i don't live in a particularly small place... And i don't wear little wings on my head! Actually Paris is the place. Maybe there are still some romans with helmets hiding in dark corners i'll watch my back.
i'll watch my back.
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