GolfHos

http://blogs.tampabay.com/schools/2007/12/in-support-of-i.html?cid=939948141

I'm convinced Pinellas County is the center of a dark world. If you look at news stories out of Florida the past 10 years I swear most come from there.

surrenders (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modesto,_California)

 [sm_banghead]

I dunno. 

There is some amazingly stupid stuff going on in texas right now.  The stuff in florida almost seems small potatoes.

It's like someone suddenly unlocked the freaky moron asylum, and the inmates were all hired by the Texas board of education.

ron paul will get them all straightened out. ;)

Very interesting responses here.  Getting past about the propriety of teaching any particular subject in public schools, I have a hard time believing all of this "just happened."  I gather that makes me a moran by GolfHosian standards.   :o [sm_shock] ;)

Forget about everything else, maybe even just answer with a 'yes' or a 'no' to keep it tame, do you believe the universe is a random accident with no guiding hand?

For extra credit, how do you explain hedgehogs?

Random act
Genesis
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/e/e9/Sonic1_box_usa.jpg/115px-Sonic1_box_usa.jpg)

No.

LOL.  Karma +1 for the Genesis word-play.

IMHO, to say that there wasn't a general contractor on the project isn't the same as saying it all happened by random accident. As a matter of fact, I'd submit that most who believe in natural selection/evolution/whatever you want to call it, would say that it was anything but random or accidental.

Also, I think phenomena  like hedgehogs, platypuses, and Dennis Kucinich are obvious signs that there either was no one in charge or whoever was in charge either has a strange sense of humor or a bad architect.

Is that a 'no'? 

[sm_devil]

It's either a yes or a no. It really depends on how you look at it.

Yes

Didn't they just find a "new" universe similar to ours in its early stages?  Conditions will eventually become perfect with millions of tries I guess. 


Hedgehogs:  see spacey's post

Is it platapi, or plata*humid grotto*?

I don't think being "created by random accident" and "created by a guiding hand" are necessarily mutually exclusive.

I can be the "intelligent creator" of a random number generator but have absolutely no control over what numbers come up.

god, thy name is statistical mechanics.

werd.  Then, if it's not picking Hot Lotto numbers they way you had envisioned, flood the *fudge*ers, or give them AIDS.  Or Britney Spears.

My only point of joining this thread was that a lot of news is made in Pinellas County.  8) ;)

That being said, I'm keeping my options open. I tend to agree with gleek's comment if I'm interpreting it they way I think.

Just a point of clarification.  I didn't say "created by random accident".  Created by implies a creator in my mind. 

The two choices I mean to offer are (1) is there is some sort, any sort, of creator out there; level of involvement undefined for purposes of my question (2) nobody created anything; everything in existence, including the building blocks of the universe, just popped into existence one day with nothing behind it.  I admit my wording here contains some bias.  Please look past it.

I think I actually agree with you gleek (although you'll probably think not.) ;)  I don't believe each and every happening is dictated according to a plan.  I do believe the ball was started rolling by a being/entity.  From there, who knows who much "guiding" was/is being done.  That gets very religious and that's not what I'm looking for here.  I'm just trying to get a feeling for how many of us believe there was/is a creator of some sort and how many say no way.

It doesn't make you a moron, it just doesn't matter what the answer is. Frame your "guiding hand" in a testable hypothesis and then you've got some science for science class. Otherwise, you're really just talking about God, or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, etc.

If people want to teach their children creation myths involving omnipotent beings, fine do that.  Enroll them in a proper religious school and expose them to all of that.  Or home school them.  Or take them to their fundamentalist evangelical church on Sundays  whispering in their ear that the pastor's words are inerrant and flow directly from the mind of God.  Whatever.   If you have a 'hunch' that it must have started with a supreme being, cherish your hunch.  Nurture it, make what you will from it.  Whatever.  Just understand that this is mysticism, not science. 

What I object to is:

A) A clunky, unimaginative religious-based creation myth reclothed in a modernistic jargon and thunk up by some of the dullest minds you'd ever meet, being foisted upon unsuspecting school kids and their families as if it is some grand alternative scientific theory when, by even extremely weak standards of science, it is not even remotely scientific in scope.  IT IS BAD EDUCATION.  And it is horrible theology because when taken to its natural end, it will eventually demand that the god perform for them in some test they've devised, which is bound to go all wrong and minimize His omnipotence.

B) Repeatedly and at great cost to taxpayers and without any regret, persistently attempting to achieve this in publicly funded school systems, despite the fact that federal courts have repeatedly barred such practices.  They will lose in court in Florida, and the school system will be out a few million dollars in legal costs, and that is money that could have been better spent on educating children properly.

This intelligent design/creationism is not an alternative theory on the origins and nature of life, it is a movement concocted by Christian fundamentalists, one that mimics naturalism, to assert their theology over what they perceive is an invading secular culture.   

Once again, the agnostics get dissed.  ???

Why do you care?

I don't know.  ;D

Because we're the only ones who are right, based on what we currently know. Yet, through almost divine irony, the agnostic view is always forced into the margins during the battles between the believers and the believers in non-belief.

Well, although I threadjacked and deserve to be chastised, the entirety of my posting here has had nothing to do with science or science classes.  I explicitly prefaced my comments to that effect (see quoted comments above.)

I like spaghetti.

'Twas just a little jest.   ;)

Diplomacy much?  ;) [sm_devil]

diplomacy is for people who are wrong and know it. ;)

put me in the undecided and don't really care section.  :D

Bingo!

I have. 

March 2005 IIRC.  ;)

Sorry if I'm holding you to words you're not comfortable with, but ...

I see a difference between the origin of the universe and the origin of man.  The Big Bang theory doesn't address anything that occurred before the BANG!  As in, no comment on where the stuff came from that formed the glop that spread out and cooled.  No comment on its composition or level of complexity.  (So far as I remember, anyway.)  So I can accept evolution as proven science, yet still find science to have no firm answer to the greater question of Where It All Came From.

On the specific issue of Man's origin, though: as a scientist more or less trained in the relevant disciplines, it seems almost impossible to me that (a) simple elements bouncing around in an energy-rich environment can combine to form simple and then increasingly complex molecules, (b) such increasingly complex molecules can then interact in increasingly complex ways, and (c) all this molecular/intermolecular whiz-bang would be selected for in any meaningful way.  Nonetheless, I see no other scientific theory in front of me, so ...

I don't see how hucksters deserve diplomatic treatment.

The creation science/Intelligent design movement is fraudulent.  Anybody with a truly open mind who takes a careful, objective look at this should recognize that.  Anybody who doesn't see that has either barely scratched the surface of the controversy, or is poorly equipped in the rational thinking department.

Here is their strategic plan, infamously known as the Wedge Document (http://www.antievolution.org/features/wedge.html).  Read it and answer this simple question: 

Is their objective really only to have public school students learn an alternative scientific theory?

Does this mean that you have no opinion or concerns about the standards of education in this country?  Because that is the only issue here.  Do you really think it is right to expose your children/grandchildren or the school children in your school district, to any crank idea that comes down the pipeline?

There are a lot of people who believe the holocaust never happened, that astronauts never landed on the moon, that space aliens will arrive to collect handfuls of chosen people to repopulate other worlds, etc.  Should these frauds be given the same equal time in the classroom that the creationist demand, to foist their crackpot notions upon the shoulders of school children as the ultimate arbiters of their truthfulness?

Evolutionary science has nothing to fear of creationism.  Creationism does not challenge evolutionary science in any way whatsoever.  It hasn't contributed to or detracted from it intellectually. So in that regard, yes, creationism really doesn't matter.

And there is scant little you can probably do anymore with respect to the evolution of your lineage.  So, yeah, evolution really doesn't matter to you or affect you in any measurable way. 

Yet, as a prideful citizen in the manufacturing belt of the USA heartland, to see your country not be the best that it can be, to embrace mediocrity and ignorance, to willfully ignore deception and outright deceit...somehow I've got to think it matters to you.

That's not true at all.  I take it you have a PhD or Masters in molecular biology or something like that.  As a scientist (who accidentally is practicing law), you should know better. 

Do you honestly think cosmologists who theorize on the "big bang" stop there, throw up their hands and say, "....and everything that comes before this point is not our realm, but that of an omnipotent supernatural being who is beyond our confines, so I have nothing to say about that."

As a matter of fact, there is a subdiscipline of cosmology devoted to theorizing about the physical conditions and laws that might have existed prior to the big bang.  For some interesting thoughts on that, see Stephen Hawking's public lecture on the Beginning of Time, here. (http://www.hawking.org.uk/lectures/lindex.html)

OK the last two posts go into my book of "so there's".

off your meds today? i was referring to this,


rant on beyotch!  ;)

See what ya started, UB? This thread was much more civil when we were just bashing Floridians.

blader's close to Florida, geographically.  ;D

oh, in that case, nevermind

(http://files.blog-city.com/files/aa/32486/p/f/emily-litella.jpg)

NSFFC, NSFC, PNSFW, NSFPRN

If I wasn't so much like Richard Branson, I'd hope to be mistaken for Lewis Black instead.

Of course not.  I think they say "....and everything that comes before this point is not our realm, so this theory has nothing formally to say about that."  Or, to take words directly from the NASA page on the subject (http://map.gsfc.nasa.gov/m_uni/uni_101bb2.html):

My point is that (again, to my understanding) the Big Bang theory relies on an "it appeared" start and does not at all address from whence the matter of that nascent universe was derived.

To be clear, there is a difference between, on the one hand, a creationist claiming God's hand is responsible for every evidentiary gap in the evolution charts and, on the other hand, a scientist accepting the Big Bang theory yet being willing to see God's hand in the creation of the space that suddenly appeared everywhere as the Big Bang phenomenon.  I tend to view the creationist as a denialist, as he clings to his religious views even in the face of strong scientific evidence to the contrary.  But where science advances no supported theory for an event, I view as closed-minded the person who rejects some theories and opens his mind to others, where his selection seemingly is based on source.  The fact that a theory is untestable doesn't make it wrong per se, it merely makes it untestable.  When an alternative that can be tested pans out, then it takes the lead.  Before then, my personal view is that the scientific mind should hold all unsupported theories equally valid.

Is it necessarily so that something has to come from somewhere/something else or that there has to be a beginning to everything? Why is it not possible that the "stuff" comprising the universe has just always been there? Maybe our way of thinking is a reflection of the limit of our cognitive abilities. Humans have a way of anthropomorphizing everything, and our brains have to apply the concept of birth and death of our own existence to other things. Perhaps the "explanation" of the universe's existence is beyond anything that we can comprehend or even imagine that we can comprehend (even if the clues were both observable and given to us). The explanation for the existence of the universe might be something we simply can't relate to. Maybe it would be like trying explain the concept of colors to a person who was born blind.

If you read that article by Stephen Hawking on The Beginning of Time, you'll see he isn't as quick as the NASA guys to throw up his hands in defeat when considering the moment before the big bang and invoke an outside agency for all that came before.  You have to read it all the way to the end to get to the Big Idea he's proposing.

Here's the issue.  The standard Big Bang model says that time had a beginning at the moment of the big bang, but also states that just before the explosion, all matter is bunched up in an infinitely dense point called a singularity, where the laws of nature don't apply.

A situation, any situation, where the laws of physics break down is disturbing.  It means one of two things:  either God did it, or there is something wrong with the theory.   Even believers in a omnipotent supernatural being would have to admit there is a better than good chance a theory deduced by man would more likely than not be shakey.

So why not entertain a theory, or at least a modification of the big bang theory, so that it can allow for both a beginning of time, and fully functional laws of nature prior to the beginning of time?  Hawking thought about this and came up with the imaginary time (http://library.thinkquest.org/27930/time.htm) hypothesis as a solution for the singularity conundrum posed by the big bang theory.

I don't pretend to understand cosmology and barely remember what physics I did learn, even though I did earn 'A' grades for 3 straight semesters of university level physics. 

But what I do possess is an intuitive appreciation for valid attempts at solving a problem of nature.   

Imaginary time, to my ear, sounds like a better hypothesis than the "God must've done it" hypothesis.  Even if imaginary time turns out to be a wrong solution, it keeps people on the track of considering that we probably haven't thought through all of the possible materialistic explanations for how the universe began and that it is probably much too early in the game to throw up our hands and invoke "theories" that begin and end with The Creator did it.

not stating i necessarily understand/think it is correct... but there is also at least some plausible thought involved in this as well..
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bounce

this is a very good point (and one which is almost certainly correct on some levels) and one of the central points in the decomposition of many religious views 

As I understand it, the way the observable universe is organized physically indicates that time has a beginning.

No offense intended, but I don't particularly find as particularly satisfying the deeming off certain subject matter as too complicated to understand or relate to.  To me, that sort of reeks of mysticism.  I guess I'm arrogant enough to think that humans have the capacity to solve most any problem that they can conceive.

I really like that idea you have of trying to explain colors to the blind.  I think that would be a very interesting exercise.  It sounds like a difficult, but not impossible task.  The solution lies in the fact that color has a physical, material basis.  Color is not metaphysical.

I think trying to explain the concept of Omnipotence/God/Outside agency to someone who has NEVER been introduced to it, might be a far more challenging task.

time has a beginning , or time has a direction?

problems that are too complicated to understand-  there are countless things that even most genius human brains, let alone average human brains, can't solve  let alone understand the generalities of.  we can derive very good approximate models to solve analytically or solve these problems numerically with computers, but they still aren't exact and/or analytic solutions.   even then, many problems falling into this area are still not even computationally tractable with the worlds best supercomputers.  doesn't mean we need to invoke a mystical explanation for them- simply that we can't understand/solve them (at least yet).

Like how the *fudge* is Don Donatello still on tv.

Donatello = Flying Spaghetti Monster/Mystical Deity of your choosing??

This seems to fly in the face of the very reason that man uses science to investigate his world.

Haven't gotten to it yet, only because the link resolved to the "home page" for his lectures, and I'd already logged out of GH and didn't have the proper title to navigate my way to it.  I'll check it out, as well as the other one you linked, too.

My approach is that, when at the hypothesis stage, "must" is not a word in the conversation.  One person can toss out a half-dozen interesting theories based on physics, none of which may currently be tested for validity.  A second person may toss out a half-dozen theology-based theories, each equally incapable of having its validity tested.  To the objective observer, at that moment, not one of the dozen theories is any more right or wrong than the others.


Ultimately, I've never been one to force a religious view upon anyone.  I've raised the positions counter to science more to show that, in rare cases, adherents of science appear to discount non-scientific theories more out of pro-science prejudice than because science has proven its own theory on the particular matter.  The question of where the matter came from that formed the universe is one such instance; the issue almost wholly lacks evidence for any theory, yet the religious accept a religious theory and dismiss scientific guesses out of hand, while the scientific accept or promote scientific theories and dismiss non-scientific guessing.  Many times, listening to people argue about unanswerable issues reveals more about the arguers than the issue.

I 'get' the joke

but there is a solution...he drives ratings...because people with Asperger's amuse us in much the same way we stop at the monkey cages every time we go to the zoo, hoping for a little poop fling action.

Aske:  As a scientist you should know by now that the most difficult aspect of discovery lies in posing the right question.

Of course, testing it is a whole other ball of wax.  If it becomes apparent we need new technology to answer the question, we go about inventing that technology.  But the hard part is the question.

The bottom line:  Our only limitation is our imagination. 

Ok, last one, and I'm done.  Promise.

blader i misunderstood what you posted earlier- yes this i mostly agree with.
framing the right question the right way often greatly increases our ability to solve a problem.