Intelligent Design Theory: Science or Religion?

I served at Travis AFB in California (OJT), got transferred to Ben Guerrier AFB in Morocco for one year, then served at Walker AFB in New Mexico. When I rode that bus out of the base for the very last time was one of the happiest days of my life. I still keep in touch with a friend I met in Morocco. Jerry now lives in Texas, and he said he'll drive up to Austin when I visit my son in the fall.

Well, that certainly settles the language/grammatical issues, Frank. Splendid job.

Steven Pinker once wrote, speaking of the self appointed language mavens, and I paraphrase,

They certainly would embarrass themselves a whole lot less if they didn't jump so quickly to unwarranted assertions on language and grammar.

How come we never saw you in the, what was the name of that thread, something about pet grammar peeves?

I'm in touch with a half dozen of the guys I served with in the UK.

We had a small SAC base there...mostly TAC aircraft. No nukes.

Danley...my friend at Enewetak saw H explosions.

Bad ****!

We gotta show we mean business about non-proliferation by getting rid of some of ours.

MY GUESS: We ain't gonna do it.

Humanity still has one more big war left in it. Not sure if the start will come on the subcontinent with India and Pakistan flinging arrows at each other...or on the Arabian Peninsula...BUT IT IS GONNA COME.

Luckily, I've already lived a fairly long and great life. Poor young bastards, though. Can't even imagine what they will be left with.

Never saw a live explosion, but saw a whole bunch of training films. We used to handle those nuclear capsules with our hands when I first worked with nukes, but before my four years were over, we didn't have to handle it by hand any more. The progress in nukes were phenomenal in just the four years I served.

On a cruise to Mexico last October, I met a scientist who worked on the nukes I worked on. He also worked on rockets, and his name is Bob Brodsky. His background is aeronautical engineering, but he started astronautics at USC and Iowa State University. We still keep in touch, and he wrote a book that he recommended for me to read, "On The Cutting Edge" that tells about his experiences, and which I read after the cruise. Interesting stuff, and I highly recommend it. You can find it on Amazon.

This is a picture I took when we went to a restaurant in Puerto Vallarta; (from left to right) is Bob, Morris (my roommate) and Pat (Bob's wife).

Amazing -- there really is six-degrees of separation as far as experiences go and on A2K, we are narrowing the gap. When I had my top secret clearance in the late 80's, I worked on the stealth fighter plane and the stealth bomber's illuminated instrument panels in the cockpit. This was at the small run manufacturing plant in Orange Country who was contracted by Lockheed. I was actually in engineering R&D as a hands-on prototype engineer, but these panels were a really small run, so they were produced behind locked doors in the R&D lab and the photo-etching lab, after the acrylic panels came out of machine shop and paint shop (also behind locked doors). I had the entire plans of the cockpit on my desk. This was before the stealth was unveiled, of course. So Farmerman and C.I., the plane that is now the most capable delivering nuclear weapons I am more familiar with than I care to think. I concur with Frank that there should be a new nuclear treaty which begins getting rid of the world's nuclear bomb inventory. Otherwise, how can we really tell Iran and North Korea they can't have any? It makes diplomacy rather idiotic.

I did see a live A bomb test at Los Alamos with my friends from Cal Tech.

Oh dear, I almost type "Los Alamitos," which would be an interesting locale to test A bombs. That would mean the US was harboring nuclear weapons.

There is no way to know everything, but it is possible to weed out some of the more wacko notions - something Frank will never grasp.

I believe I come from a professional generation later. My clearance "Q" was a DOE classification that allowed access to certain information that allowed us to set up cleanups of all the messes that were distributed about during the early tests. My biggest tasks were the cleanup of Tritiated ground water near places that ere nuclear ore piles in theWest.

I was part of a national QA team at Brookhaven for the underwater monitoring at Bikini and Enewetok.The areas are quite nice but still a bit hot. The declines in radioactivity have been faster than originally predicted , not so much becuase of decay, but wave mechanics.


Ive been out rabbit hunting for a few hours, I see ci was able to talk Frank in .

Yep, I like the Discovery Institute IDiots being 99.99% impure -- a really slim margin for truth and not really allowing agnosticism much leverage. There's always going to be "experts" who, without showing credentials (in other words, if they are already lying, why not lie about that), are scientists, doctors, and so forth who were brought up in a religious family and have defaulted to ID, but not as acutely silly as Discovery Institute or even the Biblical Creationist Defense Society.

In the AA Big Book, really in all sincerity, the chapter on agnosticism (they have none on atheism -- I guess they believe they're all hopeless drunks) treats the "affliction" as not believing in a God and, more recently, if you can't call it that to try and anchor to a "higher power." That is kind of them because a chair, nature, Andromeda, the moon, the entire Universe, or anything semantically abstract can be the "higher power," just as long as it's replaced your mate, your preachers, your boss, et al. Nobody human, in other words, who can help with the disease and because they are fallible.

Of course, if you're a Republican drunk, the higher power would have been George Bush or maybe Laura (his higher power) and now who? Rush Limbaugh. Sarah Palin (sorry, but the males just want to get in her pants).

How can your view be independent of you? The possible existence of a designer is independent of you. And, in terms of the argument Frank is making, his position is cast iron.



Frank is at pains to point out that he is not answerable for what Darwinians say. And neither am I. The view is a bit anthropomorphic. Who are they to say what is wasteful or intelligent? Taking rather a lot on themselves aren't they. They are in a circularity.



That's a partial truth masquerading as a whole truth. A sophistry. There must be a part of a "me" which exists independently of others. Which others anyway? Are you separating mind and body. It is only the mind that perceives isn't it.



Isn't it that evidence is not found when a believer begins doubting. If one said that God's morality exists for a "me" then evidence can be found to justify any morality. There is no point of God without the morality. If there is a theologically defined God the sort of moral anarchy your position encourages is avoided. Your statement might be read as you finding evidence as a function of your relationships. And that nobody ever changes their mind.

Any difficulties with the theologically defined God are a recruitment problem if it fails to serve society's interests. Which is why I think theologians take vows of chastity and poverty. Anything else and they are only pretend theologians. Criticising pretend theologians is not criticising theologians.



In an exclusive world of atheists you might need to take a negative view of something else then. Glasshouses say. You are saying you are dependent on theists to be an atheist which is why atheism is a branch of Christianity as I said yesterday. So you ought to encourage theism.



I have known a lot, about 200 I guess, of people who are officially designated scientists and they were mostly concerned with their salary and unbuttoning the lab coats of junior research assistants. And bridge theories. Golf swings. Tomato plants and motor vehicle matters. They even needed Which magazine to know what to buy. Kuhn flatters them methinks for the usual reasons.



I'm hoping there'll be some of them in the pub tonight.

I only required the top secret for about three months but the FBI really checks you out -- what your toilet habits were in the 60's, for instance.

It is great when we search for something in common rather than the vehement disagreements loaded with epithets. I makes me wonder what the person is trying to get off their back -- drugs or their mate.

Badabing. Edgar wins the cash cab.

Unless were in the realms of multidimensions we dont put any time or money on "possible solutions" for an equation when one really works to the exclusion of all the others.

Get rid of nukes!! Good lord. Are you guys kidding. We men will be back in the ******* trenches if they do that. I want to see those who start the next war get it themselves and nukes garuantee that.

What better demonstration could we have for my "big dick" thesis of yesterday than the series of posts we have just seen about the military heroism of some of our members. It's an obsession. One does have to wonder why.

And to think of the number of times I've been accused of being off topic and trolling.

What a purler! Where does "really" come from. What about "really, really, really works" What about Newton?

What "all others"? What about the ones not yet thought of? effemm just cancelled out research.

Although we learned about the lifespans of radiation, the very fact that Hiroshima is now a prospering metropolis is a fact we can't deny. It's only places like Chernobyl and Three Mile Island that gives us the information about long-term exposure.

Always forgive your enemies; nothing annoys them so much.
- Oscar Wilde

WHAT? Crass ain't the word.

Military heroism? Where's that mentioned? I just read a bad case of penus envy in that post.