WHY CREATIONISM WILL NEVER WIN

Fundamentalism is not just a Texas thing, rap. (secede, not succeed)

Personally, I hope that all individuals in Texas, and indeed across the nation, succeed.

Oops. I see Edgar beat me to it.

I don't know . . . it's not as though one would want someone such as David Berkowitz or Jeffrey Dahmer to succeed . . .

Point.

I hope you do not think I was poking fun at Catholicism. I am just amazed that there are people that subscribe to any faith that has its share of ritual (Judaism, Catholicism for two examples), and its respective adherents may choose not to see the incompatibility of science and the beliefs that their respective religion deems important. In other words, believing in a deity that is a prime mover is not incompatible with science; however, in my opinion, identifying with a religion that uses ritual as a way to define its beliefs is incompatible with science, since some rituals do poke fun at science, in my opinion.

I think the dichotomy is not science versus religion, but psychology versus religion, since religions tend to make one believe that any prime mover, being all knowing, can have a personal relationship with little 'ole me. Sort of presumptious on my part, I would believe. Then there is the whole thing about not wanting to be mortal with a finite existence; well Salvation takes care of that fear. So, I just look at religion as Freud said (I believe) it being the opiate of the masses. That is why I cannot believe in any part of it, other than the ethics/morals, which one can have as an atheist too. Religion, in other words, in my opinion, only has the redeeming factors, of being a societal control for those that might need it. I would prefer if people could just outgrow its need (i.e., Spock in Star Trek).

Since this post does not agree with your basic premise about religion and fanatacism (I have attempted to broaden the thought to religion and incongruity for thinking people), I do not expect a positive reply, if any.

I also understand what "New York" might mean in the lexicon of buzzwords. Thank you for the compliment, if it was meant as a buzzword. Let me just say that many posters, from my "New York" perspective, do appear "typical." That too can be a buzzword. Enjoy.

P.S. Since you do afford the threads the benefit of your education, I am very curious as to what school you went to post high school? I went to N.Y.U. on the G.I. bill.

I think such a view is naive in the same way that Orwell's idea that we would be coerced into totalitarianism rather than be tempted by an increasing number of addictive pleasures, and exposure to the monopoly propaganda of those offering them, was naive. I'm not even sure Orwell knew of the latter process. Pavlov had shown that operant conditioning was much more effective using pleasure rather than pain.

It is compartmentalised thinking. Inevitable maybe in the age of specialists.

It fails to take into account human nature in the round.

Religion and science are in collision because those who represent them seek to control minds and are jealous of, and intoxicated with, their powers which they resent being reduced. Like boxers they are confronting each other.

Of course, there are faint hearts and trimmers who like to delude themselves, basking in the self-flattery of being thought tolerant and emollient, that they can bring the parties to see reason. But as any policeman knows who is called out to a "domestic" it is best to not take sides unless necessary to preserve life and property.

Even Confucius knew that he who sits in middle of road gets run over by traffic going in both directions.

Power over minds is a trench not to be given up whilst still standing. And Science, seen historically, is storming the established ground of Religion and without bothering to say what we get if it triumphs. But we do know that its generals are people just like Religion's generals.

Perhaps, the short answer is what clergy of any religion would want to give up their job in the name of realism?

Conversation is wasted on you, Foofie, you're a complete schlemiel . . . and a nebbish, too. As it happens, i am a native of New York, so your perfervid fantasies (as usual) have no application here. In the lexicon of the rural South, a mush mouth is someone who talks all the time, and has nothing to say. That's you, Bubba. It probably never occurred to you that there are millions, tens of millions of Catholics who are faithful theists who don't for a moment believe that transubstantiation takes place. I doubt that you understand that as few as one in ten Presbyterians even knows the various canonical tenets of their confession, let alone understands them.

As i said earlier, yours is a classic case of being unable to see the forest for the trees. In case it hasn't sunken in with you yet, i don't intend to discuss this matter with you on your (largely irrelevant) terms.

ons and tests, Creation "Science" cannot and never will. SO the only thing thatCreation SCience can do, is to poo poo the scientific method, and try to argue away the findings and predictions as counter to the "beleifs" of the Creationist worldview.

Weve asked this so many times before that its gotten trite"Name one advance in any area of science or one prediction that has been accurately made by depending upon Creationist thinking".

Nada.

That point probably can't be repeated too often (unless Creationists start to grasp the significance of it).

Creationism doesn't teach us anything. It's an endless academic exercise which can only revel the impotence of its own purpose.

for some reason, I only had about a third of my earlir message posted. OH well, I was only talking about how science allows for predictions to be made based upon a theory. Creationism does nothing of the sort.

As I have revealed on here before, it was Nicolaus Cusanus, Cardinal and Bishop of Brixen who brought into mathematics the "infinitesmal" principle. And it was from "Old Nick" that Leibniz received the inspiration to work out the differential calculus on which all our acheivements are grounded.

It was, as usual, placed on Ignore. Tin-pot scientifics are prone to that technique. They only talk about an open mind because it sounds good. They have no idea what it means. They have never even considered the matter.

Spengler offers the idea that the good Bishop derived the idea from the contemplation of God as infinite being. I cannot say that I disagree with Spengler. Who can?

But I have another hypothesis.

It is unlikely that Nicolaus Cusa was a mystic because Cardinals are wordly men as well they might be. It's okay for saints. But it can be taken for granted that he knew the Gospels. And, as a wordly man who dispensed a severe justice, he would probably have pondered why Jesus was condemned. Not by Pilate. He gave his permission.

But not only was he a worldly man, he was a celibate intellectual chosen for his high position without regard to the forces of nepotism which have played so large a part in populating those somewhat less high postions in which the silly buggers who post anti-religious and childish crap on this thread find themselves in and which has self-evidently gone to their heads: seeing it as they do as proof that they are superior persons who have an inner wisdom fit to guide a civilisation which won't decline and fall.

As an intellectual he would have known that speaking in public about the infinitesimal was considered by the ancients in Greece, where Jesus must have wandered during the time there is no record of his activities, to be "corrupting the youth" and the very charge on which Socrates was arraigned. And there is Jesus talking to the people at his gigs about this world, meaning all of it from start to finish, being as a bolt of lightning; the shortest time he could think of. Blasphemy indeed. Of the highest order. He might well have snapped his fingers. We are nothing. My kingdom is not of this world.

What a shock to the jumped-up pipsqueaks who fancied themselves. Pythagoras was onto it. Got exiled. His religion was exterminated. One really cannot talk of the infinitessibleness of pi or the square root of two. It threatens the power of the powerful. It is knowledge beyond their capacities. It passeth their understanding. It is shamanism. Witchcraft. All IDiots.

But subjects on which Cardinals were allowed to dwell in their studies on the basis that human beings have a reason for the big things they do. They are not about to dismiss things of that nature for some sordid subjective reason to do with sex or money. They have vowed chastity and poverty. They didn't own their palaces. They had the use of them which they had earned and which transcended their own life and devolved upon their successors thus inculcating that care for the future which is the hallmark of our Faustian culture.

Why had Greek mathematics stalled? An obsession with care for the future does not envisage stalling. The Greeks never gave the future a second thought.

But for hoi polloi, like these two above, what does it matter what they think. The go through their day, which is totally grounded on the calculus, and they never give that a thought unless it is to drop the word at a cocktail party to ladies who daren't divulge their ignorance by enquiring what it means but are aware that those who do drop words like that probably have a decent job and thus might provide them with a few of the things they desire in return for certain favours of which it would be remiss of me to dwell in what is meant to be a scientific post. Or at least provide more of the things they desire than some others they could end up with if they didn't coo with admiration.

Of course, if one defines Creationism as that body of thought which has not made one advance in any area of science or made one prediction that has been accurately peer-reviewed by their pals then it is obvious that it cannot have done those things because it has already been defined as not being able to.

You guys will have to whisk your eggs up faster than that if you wish to prevent your souffles from sinking into a stodgy, glutinous mess stuck to the pan. No wonder you bite the hand that feeds you.

Two thousand years of history are not to be dismissed with a casual wave by ignorant and stupid big-heads. The two previous posts are the sort of thing one might here in a bus queue. They are profoundly insulting to the reputation of A2K and, by extension, its members.

Any prick can be negative. I can do negative when I wish.

Fancy trying to change the direction of a culture on the basis of the hopelessly inadequate learning ros and effemm have seen fit to tackle. What utter arrogance. It beggars belief.

Well done Spendius. Great post.

I doubt that it will persuade, however. Scientific criticism of spirituality; the contemplation of our origins and destiny and religion is like criticizing a beautiful airplane because, unlike a truck, it has wings.

Newton would argue with this statement, and with good cause.

I believe you miss the point completely, however, when you claim that spirituality or contemplation of God 'advanced' science at all. Even if it was the contemplation of a higher being which inspired new thought, it was not spirituality which advanced the science; it was the scientific method and testing of hypothesis. Without the scientific method, new thoughts cannot turn into advances for our species, no matter what their origin.

You are also casually conflating 'creationism,' i.e., the concept that humans were created by a God and some sort of anti-evolution argument, with Spirituality. They are not the same thing at all.



Must seem quite familiar. You attempt to do the exact opposite - keep culture from changing in any fashion, based on an inadequate and unscientific belief system. I would also say that your attitude beggars belief, if it were not so depressingly common amongst the lesser educated.

Cycloptichorn

He was indeed very defensive on the point, and wasted a great deal of energy in unseemly criticisms of Leibniz - criticism that made many skeptical of his motives. However the simple fact is that the two apparently made their discoveries independently and nearly simultaneously. Moreover, and more to the point, calculus has ever since used Leibniz' notation - not Newton's; Leibniz' terminology and definitions - not Newton's; and Leibniz' algebra of infinitesmals - not Newton's awkward and obscure "fluxions".

"Fluxions" have a lot of beauty to them, but are difficult to apply. Liebniz' notation was far easier to use and apply to interesting and new problems.

It should be noted that Newton was also divinely inspired and quite religious, yet he did not pretend that Science flowed from religion in any fashion.

Cycloptichorn

That is hardly to the point, O'George. Cyclo quoted the drivel from Spurious against which he argued. It is preposterous, in a discussion of a theory of evolution, to claim that "all our discoveries" are based on differential calculus. More absurd still is any reference to "Old Nick" or to "god" in a discussion of the development of scientific theories.

In fact, the religiously devout of the Protestant world, and in particular in England, began in the latter part of the 17th century, and in the early 18th century, to investigate the great "creation" of the nature of which they were so certain, in order to reveal the grand scale of the majesty of "god's" creation. In fact, the Bishop of Cloyne in Ireland, George Berkeley, articulated the philosophy upon which many of those Protestants based their perfervid investigation of "god's" great creation. He also attacked the logical foundation for Newton's calculus. This was all very well until Erasmus Darwin and Jean Baptiste Lamarck came along, and the basis of Bishop Ussher's 6000 year-old "creation" (those damned Protestant Irish Bishops) was challenged, as well as the fundamental proposition of a special and simultaneous creation of all forms of life.

With the arrival of Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace, the Protestant savants, whose last assault had been the Reverend Paley's watch analogy, retreated entirely from the scientific investigation of "creation," and retreated into their outworks. They're now fighting in the last ditch. How pathetic, O'George, to see you lending them aid and comfort.

My post went by your head Cyclo.

Would you care to define "lesser educated" in a manner dispensing with the notion that you are not included in their number.

And I'm all for change. Managed change. Theologically considered. Which means the scientific method applied to human activity over long periods of time. And particularly when the envelope has expanded to the point where a pin-prick would collapse it suddenly.

Take the change, as a case in point, from breech clouts to basques, frilly knickers, sheer stockings, suspenders, with pink bows on the fasteners and high heels. Now that's a Christian change. And a pin-prick can collapse that lot as fast as you can say Harry Stubbs. If you dig my drift.

Improve on that. That's what the better educated are for isn't it. Isn't it that what motivates scientists to study those arid text-books for years seeing as how it's their only chance of a shot at it. They being so nerdy and all.

Snort



I'll make it simple for you: 'those who do not understand what the Scientific method is, through either a lack of diligent study or a lack of capacity.'



These last three paragraphs utilize words, but do not make any real sense. It's like you have something wrong with your brain, and feel that just throwing a lot of words together any-old-way will give you the output you are looking for. It is certainly incomprehensible and does not reflect well upon your argument.

Cycloptichorn