Has the bias made this forum essentially irrelevant?

jar writes:I do not believe I have ever ridiculed a creationist; only Creationism and Intelligent Design.Those two subjects deserve ridicule.

Dawn Bertot writes:You see GDR, what you see above is a psychological and ego problem. No matter the question at hand, he has to be right, irregardless and especially if someone strongly disagrees.

Dawn Bertot writes:You havent won the public battle you idiot....

Taz writes:The point is we are completely unclear whether these great minds did what they did because of religion or despite of religion. All evidence seem to show that they did so in spite of religion. Would it be fair for anyone to say that Galileo retracted his claim about the heliocentricity of the heavens by his own free will?

Taz writes:Of course Newton and other great minds attributed their works to their belief in god. To not do so would have meant alienation by their peers.

Taz writes:Is this one of those no true scotsman thing?

Granny Magda writes:Oh absolutely. From that point of view, it's imperative that they evangelise me. My eternal soul is at stake after all. Which only makes it harder to see why so many creationists act like boorish belligerent assholes.

Granny Magda writes:And from my perspective that might actually be one of the few good things about creationism; it's so blatantly silly that it may well put a lot of people off Christianity altogether. A shame from your perspective, but a bit of a bonus as far as I'm concerned.

Granny Magda writes:But that assumes that there exists a chance of making headway with them. For some, that's just not true. I mean, how much headway do you think it's possible to make with, say, Robert Byers? None I'd say. the only thing left to do with such creationists is to roundly humiliate them in front of an audience, with the purpose of showing everyone else just how silly creationism really is.

Francis Collins writes:As the director of the Human Genome Project, I have led a consortium of scientists to read out the 3.1 billion letters of the human genome, our own DNA instruction book. As a believer, I see DNA, the information molecule of all living things, as God's language, and the elegance and complexity of our own bodies and the rest of nature as a reflection of God's plan.

John Polkinghorne writes:Therefore, I have to go on to ask whether it is possible, with integrity, to make sense of a third action of God in the world: God as the one who interacts with what is going on. Is such a view tenable with scientific integrity? Certainly our expectations in that respect seem to have been diminished by the advance of scientific knowledge. Indeed, has not the advance of science made this view of divine action incredible, for the world seems so well described by the regularity of natural law.
When the Church of England Prayer Book was revised in 1928, it still contained a prayer for seasonable weather for crops. When the Alternative Service Book was produced in 1980, that prayer was omitted, though the ASB does contain a harvest collect expressing thanks retrospectively for the fruits of the earth. Now, I'm not quite clear that it's sensible to be thankful afterwards for what you didn't think it was sensible to ask for beforehand, but I think we must recognize that the advance of science has, in many peoples' minds, diminished the expectation that God does anything in particular in the world. However, a God who did nothing in particular -- even if it were conceded that he did it very well -- would surely not be fittingly described as a personal God. So we have to wrestle with the problem.In actual fact, I think that those who find this difficult are caught in an outdated scientific picture of the world. In the 20th century, we have learned that whatever the physical world is, it is not a machine. It is not the world of clockwork regularity that it seemed to the people of the 18th and (to a large extent) the 19th century. The process of the world is something more subtle and more supple than that.How can I argue that's so? For a couple of reasons. One, of course, is quantum theory, lurking at the subatomic roots of the world. What seems so clear and straightforward in everyday experience suddenly becomes cloudy and fitful at that level. The quantum world is not a world which is tightly determined.That is interesting but my feeling is that it is not the most significant line of attack on the question of mechanism. The reason is that, though quantum events may be random, they are very small-scale events. When we get to the larger scale things going on in the world, like ourselves and things around us, all those uncertainties in the quantum world tend to average out. It is rather like the basis on which insurance offices work. They don't know whether you are going to die in the next five years, but they do have a pretty good idea of how many people of your age group are going to die in that period.Nevertheless, a number of other people have thought that quantum theory might be where the openness of the world lies. Some of it may indeed lie there, but I don't think it is the major thing. Where then is it located? The answer lies, I think, in the behaviour of large scale systems of some complexity. One of the most astonishing things that has happened in physics recently began when we started to realize in the last thirty years or so that the large-scale behaviour of many systems is quite different from what we thought it was. They are far from a clock-like regularity. The world, in Popper's phrase, has much more in the way of clouds in it than clocks. That is the basis of the celebrated, but not very well-named, theory of chaos.What is that theory all about? I can't describe it properly this evening, but let me give you a flavor of it. It depends upon the fact that when we have systems of some complexity, they rapidly acquire and exquisite sensitivity to circumstance. A very simple example is the air in this room. It consists of lots of molecules moving around. They are not like billiard balls, but they behave in many ways as if they were. Let's take that model, for it's not too misleading. The molecules are whizzing around and colliding with each other. In a period of (ten to the minus ten) seconds (that's one ten thousand millionth of a second, a pretty short time!) each of these molecules has had about fifty collisions with its neighbors.I then ask myself the following question: how accurately do I have to know how things were moving at the beginning in order to be able to calculate with tolerable accuracy how they will be moving at the end of that period, (ten to the minus ten) seconds? Each billiard ball collision is a perfectly determined event, but the way the billiard balls separate depends extremely sensitively on the exact angle at which they hit each other. If anyone here has ever played snooker or pool, they will be well aware of that fact!In the course of successive collisions, the uncertainties mount up (they exponentiate, as the mathematically minded say). It turns out that my calculation of how these billiard ball molecules would be moving will be badly out if I have neglected to take into account the presence of an extra electron (the smallest particle of matter) on the other side of the observable universe (about as far away as you can get) interacting with the molecules through its gravitational force (the weakest of the intrinsic forces of nature).In other words, such a system is unpredictable -- for I can't know about that electron on the other side of the universe -- and it is intrinsically un-isolable. So you see, systems of some degree of complexity really are exquisitely sensitive to circumstance. One of the first ways we learned this was when people started thinking about the weather. It is sometimes referred to as the butterfly effect: that a butterfly stirring the air with its wings in Beijing will affect storm systems over New York in a fortnight's time.What are we to make of this? What we've learned is the complex systems are exquisitely sensitive and therefore intrinsically unpredictable. "Aha," you say, "but that is simply epistemology. It simply means we can't know what is happening; nevertheless, they may be running along perfectly rigid lines." Well, they might be, but we don't have to buy that. My instincts as a scientist are that what we can know and what is the case are very closely related to each other. That's why scientists are realists. A realist believes that what you can know and what is the case are closely connected.Critical realists have written on their T-shirts the slogan, "Epistemology Models Ontology." It is therefore a possible move, and in my mind, a good move, to move from unpredictability (an epistemological statement) to openness (an ontological statement) -- to say that the future is not simply a tautologous rearrangement of what was already present in the past, but something really new.Science through the theory of chaos seems to describe a world of genuine becoming, with a future which is different from the past, a world of real novelty. If that is so it is a gain for physics, for it means that physics begins to describe a world of which we can conceive ourselves as inhabitants. For we experience openness and choice.Thus it seems to me that modern science tells us that we live in a world whose ground rules do not specify all happenings completely. Instead, they outline an envelope of future possibilities. Chaos theory is badly named, actually. It isn't just randomness; rather, it is a sort of structured openness that it produces. We live in just such a world of flexible openness. It is a world in which we can act, and if we can act, I don't see why God can't act in it as well, within the hiddenness of flexible process.What does he do and what do we do? That is a difficult question that I am unable to answer properly. But it is a familiar question, for it is simply the theological problem of grace and free will written cosmically large. We live in a world whose openness and hidden flexibility mean that it is a world in which God can be at work.

Granny Magda writes:Maybe. Maybe not. I don't think that the Bible, being a work of disparate parts, can be said to have any single correct way of approaching it. There must have been multiple intents by the multiple authors. Some of what creationists and literalist take as being literal probably was intended as a literal statement of fact. Some of it they are taking out of context.I think the biggest single mistake made by Christians interpreting the Bible is the idea that it forms a cohesive whole. I don't think it does. Sure there are themes that come up repeatedly, but there are big departures as well, especially between Old and New Testaments.

Granny Magda writes:Really? Do you think so? I wouldn't have thought so, but then, i am in Britain, where the moderate Church of England is the biggest player. Round my way the Muslims are probably the biggest creationist group!

Granny Magda writes:I know that you hold that opinion, but in my view, you could say that about all religious discourse. If you took the Bible, old and new, all the associated works and apocrypha, then threw in the Quran, the Vedas, the Guru Granth, ect., you would still be able to draw a meta-narrative. The themes you cite are common to all religion, or certainly all modern ones.

Theodoric writes:Evolution is not an atheistic belief.

Percy writes:I believe that any conclusions I might reach about ultimate origins are bound to be wrong, so I try to avoid reaching any. If you really meant "cosmic accident" then that probably isn't a possibility in which I could see much promise, but if what you meant comes closer to feelings of skepticism that the universe came about simply by reality being reality then I can say that I share these feelings.

Percy writes:And you might also agree with me that at the same time I see no overt evidence for intelligent guidance.

Percy writes:I wish I could make this happen, but there are practical issues regarding moderation that are too complex and debatable to get into, and with so many bad examples out there like PZ Myers and Dawkins and Penn & Teller's show, not to mention the more, uh, excitable members here, its like putting your finger in the dike. Too many people feel if you can insult it or ridicule it you've rebutted it.