Creationists think Evolutionists think like Creationists.

As do many evolutionists, being that 30% of biologists are theists of one sort or another. Also, atheists and agnostics also believe in morals and good nature and think they are worth pursuing. Survival of the fittest is simply what happens just like gravity and the transmission of infectious diseases (that good ol' Germ Theory). What nature does in no way informs us of what we ought to do. Success is measured in living a fulfilling life.

Much of this can be explained by projection, IMHO. Creationists accept creationism because their religious texts tell them to believe in it. Creationists project this thought process onto evolutionists. They believe that evolutionists do the same thing, except that their "bible" is "On the Origin of Species". They actually think that atheists are somehow lost and need something to cling to, and so they pick evolution as a religious belief that helps define their worldview. Creationists don't see this as science vs. religion but as religious vs. religion.

How do evolutionists think, in your opinion? Please keep in mind that about 30% of biologists world wide believe in some form of a creator god and an afterlife.

The standard is empricism. Fossils are objective things that exist outside of someone's head. Near death experiences do not meet this requirement. That would meet the standards of empirical evidence, but your NDE's do not since only one person experiences it and it is not available to others. You are moving towards dishonesty land.

I have actually read a lot on this "controversy", and I think it sheds a lot of light on the topic at hand. The truth of the matter is that Gonzalez had secured very little grant money, had no major grants from the big foundations like NASA and NSF, had stopped doing new research, and had only graduated one student. What publications he did have during his time at ISU were based on work he had done during graduate school and postdoc work. Admittedly, Gonzalez showed a lot of promise during grad school and during his postdoc years which is why he was hired on at ISU. However, once Gonzalez was on his own he failed to do what is required of scientists at research universities, get funding and graduate students. This is why he was denied tenure, and there is very little Gonzalez can do to deny this.Tenure is something that is EARNED, not given simply by being around for a little while. Gonzalez hadn't earned it by every measure available. All of this can be determined without ever mentioning his ID leanings.So what does this have to do with the topic at hand? Creationists think adherence to theology is more important than adherence to reality. Glenn Morton speaks of this very thing in his autobiography:

quote:

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By 1986, the growing doubts about the ability of the widely accepted creationist viewpoints to explain the geologic data led to a nearly 10 year withdrawal from publication. My last young-earth paper was entitled Geologic Challenges to a Young-earth, which I presented as the first paper in the First International Conference on Creationism. It was not well received. Young-earth creationists don't like being told they are wrong. The reaction to the pictures, seismic data, the logic disgusted me. They were more interested in what I sounded like than in the data!
http://home.entouch.net/dmd/gstory.htm

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Creationists assume that evolutionists are just like them. They figure that adherence to this supposed "evolutionary theology" is more important than anything else, including the data. They never stop to think that maybe, just maybe, the data actually matters. That scientific research really matters. That getting grant money to do original research matters. That graduating new scientists actually matters.

How can calculations point to something outside of the natural? How does that work? 1/0=infinity, therefore leprechauns? Is that your argument?The fact of the matter is that our current understanding of nature is incomplete, and probably always will be. GR and QM are great models, but they are just models. They are not reality. When you try to combine GR and QM and get infinities (aka wrong answers) it tells us that GR and QM are wrong in some way. It is very much like the fall of classical mechanics when the precession in Mercury's orbit was first observed. The failure of Newton's equations did not point to something outside of nature. It pointed to a problem in Newton's equations and our understanding of gravity.

What about Newton's Laws of Gravity and the precession of Mercury's orbit? The orbit demonstrated that Newton's laws were wrong, but it didn't point towards Relativity. Mercury's orbit simply showed that Newton is wrong in the same way that current calculations demonstrate that QM and GR are wrong or incomplete on some level (which every physicist has known for quite some time).

If memory serves, Einstein was firmly in the Deterministic school of thought. Remember the quip "God does not play dice"? Or rather, that our world is made up of more than the 4 dimensions that we are familiar with right now. The extra dimensions hinted at in String Theory do not lie outside of our world but are a part of it. A good analogy is Reimman's bookworm. In this analogy the 3D curvature of the crumpled page is detected as a force by the bookworm.

The extra dimensions are potentially detectable through instruments such as the LHC. They would be no more metaphysical than radio waves.