Wodium
Yes, thats the question. The character isn't a Discordian. She's a worshipper of Gaia, and a member of a coven. I'm wondering what happens to someone who tries to zap someone with magic, and fails by bad luck.
Graham,
Flip it around. Imagine I had a position of power over you, I was your biology teacher, and I said "People who believe in evolution are ignorant or insane. There is a third possibility which I don't like to entertain...they are wicked." That was Dawkins, but he was saying it about Creationists or IDers, if I remember right. I can get the exact quote if need be. Would you be remotely comfortable in that class?
Science is
1. A hypotheses.
2. An experiment to yield positive or negative data.
3. Confirmation or disconfirmation.
4. Repeat process.
5. Eventually yield a tested hypotheses that gets elevated to a fact, and papers are written, and peer reviewed and so on.
Both main theories are one-time only events. Can't repeat them, can't observe them. Neither are experimental science.
At best, they are historical sciences like Forensic Medicine.
Another strike, both have a strong element of philosophy aka religion. Darwinism does not require Materialism, but most practitioners are such. Creationism and ID don't require Theism (one noted IDer, Berlinski is an atheist), but most are. This is a religious conflict. Philosophy is not science.
And I can argue the exact opposite as well, both Darwinism and ID are science. It depends on your definition of science.
However, I will not accept the definition that goes 'Only natural causes are science' because that is the fraud that Behe exposed.
Brock:
Let me poke a few holes in S.S. Beagle then.
1. There are huge lengths of time where the pre-human hominids and man coexisted. The superior form must destroy or replace somehow the inferior form, or you can't have evolution. Evolution is about death of the inferior form. No death, no evolution.
2. After Mt. St. Helens exploded, they had a hundred foot deep canyon form in ten days. It requires lots of time OR lots of water to form something like the Grand Canyon. Lots of water=Noah's Flood.
If the various sediment layers in the GC were laid down millions of years apart, then you'd expect to see significant erosion between the layers. When you don't see it, there's an obvious conclusion.
I've seen multiple pics of stalactites that were seriously tall (one was a pillar taller than a man) that were formed in timespans of half a century or less. Some processes can work a lot faster than we think.
3. Take out a globe. Look at all the brown areas. Doesn't it look like someone took out a cosmic blowtorch or some tool of destruction and just had at it with our poor ball of mud? Such a view point is Catastrophism which is opposed by Uniformatarianism. U was embraced by Darwin as a means to get teh vast amounts of time neccessary for his theory. Catastrophism can give you the same results in a lot less time, and I think C fits the evidence better.
4. Icons of Evolution: There are a number of great supports for evolution. I'll discuss one. The Peppered Moths.
A. They were dead. That famous picture was of dead moths glued to a tree. Like Piltdown Man, Java Man, Nebraska Man, and Neanderthal Man as originally envisioned these were blatantly incorrect, or frauds.
B. If I sent out my Killer Robots to destroy all Chihuahuas, and as a result there was a general loss to the dog genome of small genes and yappy genes, and people instead bought more Great Danes, would that be evolution? Has any new information been added? Hasn't there been a loss of data? If a pair of little yappers survived my mad plan, and reproduced in plenty after the police hauled me and my bots away, and people got rid of their Danes because they were too big, would that be evolution? Or would it simply be variation in a kind?
5. Specified complexity. To be simple, this is the idea that if you add lots of improbability and a message together you get something that has only been observed to be created by an intelligent mind. If you walk into the dessert and see three stones on top of each other, you think 'how unlikely, maybe a man made it.' If you see five stones with three in a line and two branching off to make an arrow, you think 'a human made this'.
Is it not reasonable to see a staggeringly unlikely formation that has information in it, and think 'someone made this'? Whether that someone is the Progenitors or Yahweh is not provable at that point.
6. Irreducibility: There are a number of processes that require the whole system to function at the same time, or the parts that do not function are a drag on the body, and are selected against. It does little good to give stronger muscles to a jaw if there are not stronger bones in the jaw is a very simple example.
7. Polonium Halos: Without signs of leakage, you can find radioactive halos in granite. These halos form when there is a radioactive decay which takes three minutes for this particular situation. If the rocks were slowly cooling over vast time spans, the halos would be disrupted. Just as if you dropped a dot of food coloring into a pot of water on a rolling boil. Any ring created would soon be gone. However, such a ring might last longer if you dropped it in to a pot of still water, and then flash froze it with your handy bottle of liquid nitrogen that you keep at all times (mine is right next to me.)
Thus the granites with the halos were created in a timespan under three minutes.
8. There are roughly 200 independent stories of global floods in various national histories. Where did this come from? Were our ancestors clueless or liars?
It took Noah a year to build the Ark. If it was a local flood, why didn't he walk ten miles a day for six months, and get 1800 miles away? It would have been easier.
9. A brain scientist tested people's reactions to having an electrode touched to move their arm. They said even as their arm moved "I didn't do that." What is that "I" to which they are referring? Is it the immaterial part of humans the signal that finds a receiver in a human brain, and that receives messages back from the human brain which alter the signal?
Why is it that a professor who teaches determinism will counsel a student to make an effort not to be late to class again?
If Darwin is right, we are determined. If we're not determined, then Darwin is wrong.
If we're determined then we have no validity to what we think. I cannot say 'this is true' because I'm just a pinball machine without flippers or a ball booster. If we're determined, then we're zombies. I'm not a zombie. Thus I'm not determined. I can discover truth by various means including science. If I'm determined, I can't.
Without free will and the capacity to find truth, science is quite literally nonsensical.
This does not mean that Evolution is wrong. Some form of non-materialist Evolution could allow for free will and reason, but Darwin was a materialist. The point of evolution was to remove the necessity of God. Its why Darwin made the theory. Darwin, like a lot of atheists, I think, was mad at God. His beloved daughter died.
However, I'm not sure that saying 'my daughter was an illusion' is much better than 'my daughter died'. Thankfully, I've never been there. But we can have compassion for a man without buying into his bad ideas.
