User talk:Jorfer/Archive 2

Evolution

Selected behaviors

Some of your recent comments to Talk:Level of support for evolution reflect a fundamental misunderstanding of what Evolution is. It is not appropriate for us to discuss whether evolution is or isn't valid on that page, but if you wish, I am willing to discuss this matter with you on this Talk page, in the interests of us reaching, at the very least, a basic mutual understanding.

"I know I am not the only person that feels that the support is because of John Dewey's advocation and not Charles Darwin's theory so I will find sources but the tag should stay up anyways." - This doesn't explain why Darwin's theory was widely accepted before any of Dewey's reforms were enacted, nor why Darwin's theory is even more widely-accepted in some other parts of the world that were not directly impacted by such reforms. There is no evidence against evolution, and mountains of evidence for evolution; there is no evidence that evolution's support is based on some sort of elaborate, interconnected network of coincidental educational blunders that somehow escaped the notice of tens of millions of scientists, educators, and laypeople alike. Your claim here is essentially a conspiracy theory, and all the more implausible because you seem to ascribe it to coincidence rather than conspiracy.

"I just find it ironic that evolutionists, who believe that human nature was formed by millions of years of evolution (it is millions, correct)," - Incorrect. It is billions. It would be inconceivable for all the life on Earth to evolve in mere millions of years.

"can so quickly dismiss human's natural inclination to believe in a Creator." - Why is that ironic? If "human nature" was formed evolutionarily, we would not expect humans to have flawless reasoning skills; we would expect them to have good enough reasoning to accomodate their survival, but to have certain defects and limitations and disorders, which is what we find. See cognitive bias and Cognitive distortion, for example. One of these biases is that we are prone to anthropomorphizing non-human things (cf. pathetic fallacy), which makes us highly prone to assuming an intelligent cause behind natural phenomena. Fortunately, we can overcome most of these biases if we work at it. But that doesn't mean that our natural inclinations are always likely to be correct.

Irrationality would have of course been eliminated over billions of years, would it have not?--Jorfer 18:14, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Not necessarily (only if every type of thinking that constitutes "irrationality" was selected against simultaneously, which is rarely the case because many irrational modes of thought are effectively irrelevant to survival and reproduction, and thus selectively neutral), but the brain has only existed for some 600 million years, and human-sized brains have only been around for a few hundred thousand years. -Silence 19:42, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

So belief in a Creator is not important for survival. Let me ask you, are you more or less likely to engage in risky behavior if you believe there is an after-life.

Many societies and cultures, and certainly many individuals, don't believe in a Creator. Belief in a Creator is not innate, it's a result of cultural indoctrination. What I said was innate was the human impulse to anthropomorphize natural phenomena: it's responsible for everything from "the man in the moon" to "that bump in the night must be a robber!" to "storms happen because the gods are angry" to God, and the different ways in which people anthropomorphize phenomena result in wildly different, but inevitably anthropocentric, beliefs. Belief in an afterlife, similarly, isn't innate; many religions, like Hinduism, teach reincarnation rather than Heaven/Hell. Heck, some denominations of Buddhism go so far as to deny the existence of any deities. We live in an extremely pluralistic world, where a wide range of beliefs coexist and interact; the similarities between those beliefs are largely the result of our shared human experience, including our anthropomorphic bias (pathetic fallacy); the differences are largely the result of different cultural interpretations and histories. Natural selection has little to do with belief in an afterlife, and depending on the type of afterlife that's believed in, such belief may either be conducive to survival, or harmful: if you believe that committing suicide will cause you to go to Hell, for example, then such an afterlife-belief has survival benefits, whereas if you believe that as soon as you die you'll go to paradise no matter what, then that belief is harmful to your chances of survival. -Silence 22:10, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

P.S.I like how you connected the word only and 600 million years.

Thanks, I'm proud of that too. ;) It's not often that you get a chance to! But geologic time is one of those rare cases. -Silence 22:10, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

You say belief in a creator is a result of cultural indoctrination, but if it was not part of human nature to believe in a creator, why would so many different societies have accepted it if they doubted its truth. From the Native Americans to the Egyptians to the Babylonians to the Chinese to the Greeks to the Romans, many seperated and wide-ranging ancient cultures accepted the idea of a creator or multiple ones, so are you suggesting this was cultural indoctrination? If you are it would seem even more outrageous a claim as suggesting support for evolution is a result of the educational system? I did not even mention that today atheism is still held by a small segment of the world population (with globalization, cultural indoctrination is at least a more believable concept, but still "out there").--Jorfer 00:14, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

• Most Romans did not believe in a Creator; early Roman religion was more ritualistic than mythological, and did not have any specific faith in, or reverence for, a Creator. Romans later adopted foreign mythological beliefs from the Greeks and other cultures, but the Greeks didn't have any strong emphasis on a "creator" either, instead favoring belief in a primordial chaos whence things like the Earth simply "emerged". Native Americans held thousands of different origin beliefs, only some of which emphasized a Creator. The Chinese, like the Romans, did not have any specific belief in a Creator. Babylonian mythology does not believe in any one creator, but rather in a pair of creators: Apsu and Tiamat, representing the waters. There is no real similarity between the Babylonian origin belief and hte Christian one, so attempting to ascribe a link to the two is a real stretch. The Egyptians are probably the closest to the sort of belief in a Creator you're talking about, but even they held a wide variety of different beliefs in different times and places. Furthermore, it is important to note that the Egyptians and Babylonians had a dramatic impact on the mythology of the Jews, and obviously the Jewish creation myth served as the foundation for both the Christian and Islamic ones, meaning that any similarities between these specific religions is insubstantial to your point, as they are already accounted for by inter-cultural borrowings. So, your attempt to provide examples showing that Creation is a universal belief fail pretty pitifully; you had tens of thousands of different cultures to choose from, and you ended up selecting a handful that had little to no real emphasis on a "Creator", in the Christian sense, particularly in the case of the ancient Romans and Chinese. This shows the relative heterogeneity of human beliefs, which have never held universally to the notion of a Creator; some religions, such as Hinduism and Buddhism, may even reject the very notion of creation, or a beginning to all things!
• Of course, these are the exception, not the rule; the real commonality between many different cultures is that they are curious about where things came from. This curiosity leads them to construct myths about the origin of things—origin beliefs, in other words. And since humans have a limited imagination, and, as already demonstrated, are extremely prone to anthropomorphization, it is clear why many cultures would be quick to try to explain the origin of the world in terms of human-like entities, like spirits or deities or giants. Beyond these two basic similarities (an interest in origins, and a tendency to anthropomorphize phenomena), there is no real thread of commonality that can be said to exist between even a majority of religious beliefs, much less absolutely 100% of them.
• By "cultural indoctrination", I do not mean to suggest that people are brainwashed; rather, it is simply a fact that people will tend to adhere to beliefs that accord with what their culture teaches. That's why Christian families tend to raise Christians, Hindu families tend to raise Hindus, and non-religious families tend to raise atheists or agnostics. Most cultures throughout history have not believed in anything remotely resembling the Christian God; this effectively falsifies the idea that belief in such a God is innate or inherent within people, and alternative, more plausible explanations for what commonalities are there (like simply human anthropocentrism and curiosity about origins) remove the need for such an extraordinary explanation, when the phenomenon itself (of different cultures holding beliefs in superhuman beings being involved in the creation of the universe) is so simple and, really, unremarkable. -Silence 07:31, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Wasn't Zeus the creator in Greek and Roman mythology?--Jorfer 00:09, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Nope, he was not. Zeus was the god of the heavens and the ruler of the gods, so it's understandable that you'd confuse him with another sky-god, Yahweh, but Zeus had no role whatsoever in Creation in the Greek cosmology. Rather, Zeus was a child of the Titans; he overthrow his father, Khronos, who was the ruler of the universe prior to Zeus. Khronos, in turn, had overthrown his own father, Ouranos. So Zeus was at least two degrees of separation away from the Protogenoi, or primeval Greek deities. (Greek mythology did have origin myths, but most of them did not involve any real "Creator", and in any case dozens of such myths existed, each contradicting the others. If you want a Jehovah-style Creator, you'd have better luck looking in Greek philosophy than in Greek religion—cf. Plato's demiurge.) Also, Zeus was an exclusively Greek god originally; he was later borrowed by the Romans into their own mythology, but generally under the name Iuppiter (Jupiter). Iuppiter, too, was never a creator-god to the Romans.

We should be careful not to conflate the notion of a supreme deity (i.e., the strongest deity, who rules over the universe) with the notion of a creator deity; in many cases, the two were separate beings in myths, or only one or the other was represented. This is because they served fundamentally different functions: the supreme deity served as a divine embodiment of the king, the ultimate authority and the force of order and justice in the universe; the creator deity, in contrast, served as a divine embodiment of one's mother or father, who gives birth to the universe. (In Greek mythology, several different deities can be argued to have assumed this role, depending on the specific cosmology being presented; for example, Gaea could be construed as representing this mother archetype in Hesiod, whereas Nyx assumed this role in Orphic poetry.) The reason we are prone to conflating these two distinct classes of gods is because of the influence on our culture of Hebrew mythology (by way of Christian mythology), which merged the two in the form of Yahweh, a supreme creator/ruler. It is culturally ignorant to assume that this is the case for all other religions and mythologies, just because it is the case for ours. -Silence 00:59, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

"The interesting is that people exist today that are not bent on survival of the fittest" - Strawman. Darwinian evolution has nothing to do with the concept of "survival of the fittest"; that is a terrible way to represent how biological evolution actually occurs, and one most biologists (including Darwin himself) don't use. Organisms do compete for limited resources, but they are also vitally dependent upon cooperation in order to survive: working together with other members of your species, and in many cases even with other species, is a superbly effective strategy for survival. Evolution is not a "war of all against all"; indeed, almost all life on Earth depends on cooperation and interdependence for survival; that's what an ecosystem is, for starters.

That is a good naturalistic reason for cooperation (when it is beneficial to society) but it does not explain caring for the less fortunate (when it is often a burden for sociey). For example, it is a burden on society to keep people alive after they are able to work, yet programs like Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid exist.--Jorfer 18:14, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Emotions exist to impel us to do things that benefit us. For example, the purpose of fear is to give us instinctive reason to avoid certain harmful things (like dangerous animals, dark and unexplored places, and poisonous snakes or bugs); the purpose of happiness is to give us instinctive reason to pursue certain beneficial activities (like eating, having sex, and socializing). Humans have the capacity for "caring" because caring is an emotional and psychological state that promotes socializing and improves group dynamics; caring for the less fortunate helps this as well. For example, human children are "less fortunate"; if we were dismissive of anyone weak or incapable of caring for himself, we would abandon our own children to the wilderness. Obviously this would be selected against, so we have the natural instinct to care for children specifically, and, more generally, for anyone helpless who we empathize with (e.g., not only helpless humans, but also helpless human-like species, like puppies; in contrast, we rarely feel any impulse to care for helpless scorpions, or clams, or blades of grass).

Furthermore, in many cases seemingly "helpless" people will heal over time (e.g., if you care for a sick tribe-mate, he may eventually get better), or will be able to give limited benefit to the community (e.g., someone with a missing arm might still be able to do some productive activities). So it is not surprising that we would have developed a strong instinct to care for people, and one which is not contingent solely upon how much they can benefit us at this moment (since children, sick people, etc. may be useless at the moment, but very helpful later on if they are looked after now). Historically, most people who have been extremely sick or injured have died, so there has never in the past been the huge population of invalids that live today, which explains why there has never been a strong selective pressure on us to "off" people who are permanently helpless (though such a thing is not unheard-of, especially for, e.g., comatose people). -Silence 19:42, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I have to admit that this is a great point. I'll get back to you on this one.--Jorfer 20:36, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

OK, take your time. -Silence 22:10, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

• You gave a good explanation for altruism, but how can you naturalisticly explain other human behaviors such as laziness and suicidal tendencies; these surely would have been eliminated at a much earlier evolutionary stage.--Jorfer 00:24, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

• It's true that suicide isn't unknown, but how often do you see people randomly decide to kill themselves? It's true that laziness is present, but don't most people still spend most of their lives being rather productive and engaged in some activity or other? (Including the most important activities for the purposes of natural selection: sex and food. If people didn't care about eating, having sex, etc., you'd have a much better case for natural selection being unable to explain human nature. The natural human instinct for self-preservation and for not killing oneself shows how natural selection strongly discourages suicide; and the natural human emotion of boredom, and the tendency of becoming unhappy or dissatisfied whenever not enough productive activities are being engaged in, show how natural selection discourages simply remaining inactive and passive all day long. (Though laziness is not nearly as selected against than suicide, because being a bit lazy isn't necessarily going to prevent you from surviving and reproducing, as long as you keep yourself alive and sexually active; which is why almost everyone is lazy at some time or another, but the incidence of suicide is exceedingly low, even among people who might have really compelling personal reasons to commit suicide!) Evolution works by degrees, never in absolutes; when something is harmful to a population, it will tend to become progressively rarer and rarer over time, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it will ever vanish altogether. No species is perfect, which is why evolution is constantly occurring for every population of organisms on earth. But the rarity of suicide, and the rarity of laziness so intense that it impedes survival or reproduction. Moreover, in cases where suicide does occur, it is not a result of natural selection, but, often, of chemical imbalances (and in many cases imbalances which are partly caused by aspects of modern life, like our tendency to get not enough sleep, not enough sunlight and nutrients, etc., explaining why they haven't been more selected against throughout history). To doubt evolution because humans are capable of defects (like depression) is silly; i's like doubting evolution because humans are capable of getting sick, or because we're born with harmful mutations sometimes, or because we can break our bones if we fall too hard. Natural selection minimizes harmful influences and activities (which is why most people instinctively don't try to break their bones; it's why breaking our bones causes us pain; etc.), but it rarely renders us entirely immune to them. For example, due to a quirk in our brain chemistry (one shared by many other animal species, like bees), we are susceptible to becoming drunk when we drink alcohol. Does this fact disprove evolution, because being drunk all the time limits our changes of survival (by making us more likely to get into a car accident, for example) and reproduction (by temporarily decreasing our sexual potency)? Of course not; such effects are a side-effect of traits that were selected for. Moreover, even though we are not immune to inebriation, we have developed a dramatically improved resistance to it from our ancestors, due to the selective pressures. This is also why, for example, Europeans have a much higher alcohol tolerance than Native Americans, who consequently had (and are still having) their population devastated by the sudden exposure to it. Natural selection always works by baby steps. Incidentally, you might be surprised to learn that laziness actually has a selective advantage: people who are somewhat lazy are more likely to survive than people who are not lazy at all, because the lazy one will conserve his energy more and won't waste it all on trivial activities. Laziness encourages us to only spend our time on really worthwhile activities, rather than waste all our energy on strenuous, yet useless, tasks. -Silence 00:59, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

• Still, much of the laziness we see today is not saving time from trivial activities, but dedicating extra time into trivial activities (i.e.watching football or American Idol)--Jorfer 02:42, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

P.S. You should have your clinchers patented and used in grammer textbooks eveywhere.

• And that has survival benefits too. How often do people die while watching football or American Idol, compared to how often people die while, say, driving around? Being out and about is naturally more dangerous than staying at home and doing little. Moreover, if you aren't lazy, you'll use up your energy reserves faster and need to eat more often (a very bad thing, considering that food has often been a commodity throughout history, and continues to be one in many parts of the world), and be less able to react accordingly if an unexpected situation arises. Therefore natural selection favors people which are at least somewhat lazy, as those people will be more prone to "staying at home" when there isn't any vital reason to leave, and thus will tend to outsurvive more enterprising organisms that waste their time and energy on non-essential, strenuous pursuits when they could just be lounging around, or engaging in less taxing activities.
• Evolutionarily speaking, the only reason for an organism ever to leave its home is to acquire things it needs to survive (like food—and, in modern society, things we need in order to get food, like money) or to engage in activities that will increase its odds of reproducing (i.e., socializing). Organisms that are absolutely unlazy and are always out and about will this be selected against, not for, thus preserving the genes for laziness in our species. Laziness encourages us to avoid spending unnecessary energy, and avoid taking unnecessary risks; it is therefore, at least in moderation, selected for. Evolution doesn't care how much time we spend pursuing "trivial activities", as long as we are taking the time to survive and reproduce (and few people indeed are so lazy as to not be interested in sex, or in life or general!), and as long as those trivial activities endanger and/or drain us as little as possible. -Silence 00:06, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

• It would seem that we are setting a rather low bar for survival and I would expect that "transitional species" like the caveman and other claimed ancestors of man would have survived in at least some number, even if they did not thrive, unless they all evolved at once.--Jorfer 01:51, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

• What do you mean by a "low bar for survival"? What "bar" are you referring to? Survival is survival. There is no "better survival", and no "worse survival", in natural selection: all survival is equally good. Evolution does not care about quality of life, about happiness, about beauty, about progress or achievement; all natural selection encourages is furthering the survival of species. If humans could survive and reproduce a lot more effectively without any social contact at all, without any happiness, without any major accomplishments, without any of the things that make our actual lives so worth living in our eyes, then natural selection would have discouraged, rather than encouraged, our socialization, happiness, achievement, etc. It is only because they were beneficial traits, and not harmful ones, that they were retained and propagated; and that benefit is measured solely in terms of survival and reproduction, not in terms of quality of life.
• If being happy all the time was conducive to our surviving and reproducing, then we would be happy all the time; because it is not (dissatisfaction encourages the pursuit of happiness, which encourages doing things that make us happy, like eating and having sex), we are not. If being completely unlazy was conducive to our surviving and reproducing, then we would never be lazy; because it is not (a degree of laziness is important for discouraging some unnecessarily risky or costly activities), we are not.
• Also, caveman, as the word is generally used, refers to early humans, not ancestors of humans. They are not a transitional species, because they are not a species. Rather, they are humans (or at least hominids) living during the Paleolithic era.
• Your comment also demonstrates a misunderstanding of how evolution works: the overwhelming majority of species that have ever lived are now extinct. In fact, out of all the species that have ever lived, only one in a thousand is still alive today. This clearly shows that any one species is exceedingly unlikely to be alive to this day, so we should not be surprised when we find fossils of species that are no longer living. It is much more surprising and exceptional to find living fossils than to find fossils of extinct organisms, because very few species have ever survived for more than a few million years, if that. With such small odds of any one species surviving to this day, it is thus relatively unsurprising that humans are the surviving representatives of their genus Homo, for the same reason that it is unsurprising to find that platypuses are the only surviving species of their genus, Ornithorhynchus. In fact, platypuses are much more unusual than humans in this respect: whereas humans have other surviving representatives in their family, Hominidae (those being chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans), all other representatives of the platypus family, Ornithorhynchidae, are extinct (thus the closest relative to platypuses is only in the same Order as the platypus, Monotremata). If you do not find it unduly disturbing that the relatives of the sole surviving platypus species are no longer "surviving in at least some number", then there is no reason for you to find it disturbing that the relatives of the sole surviving human species are similarly deceased.
• Your other comment, "unless they all evolved at once", also demonstrates a number of misunderstandings of how evolution works. First, evolution is always an exceedingly gradual, incremental process; it is almost never possible to clearly see when one species is turning into another, except at best in hindsight. This is because the changes that occur are so slow; a child can never be identified as being a clearly different species from its parent. Yet new species have been observed arising. The clearest example of this phenomenon is in ring species: in a situation where three populations live in a geographic "ring", population A is able to interbreed with population B, and population B is able to interbreed with population C, but populations A and C are unable to interbreed. Why? Because they've gradually accumulated so many changes that although population B, the halfway mark between the two species, can interbreed with both groups, the other two, long-separate groups can no longer produce fertile offspring. This is how new species arise: gradually, and by a matter of degrees, not suddenly.
• Second, evolution does not require that an entire species turn into an entire new species; rather, there are two different methods for speciation. The first, anagenesis, indeed involves an entire species turning into a new one. But the second, cladogenesis, is much more common: it occurs when a subset of a single species turns into a new species, while the rest of the species remains the same species. These evolutionary "splitting" events often occur when two populations of a single species are isolated from each other for enough time for one or both of them to accumulate adaptive differences that distinguish the two sufficiently for one (or both) to be considered a new species. Thus, early Homo sapiens lived at the same time as their ancestor-species, until that species became extinct; this is extremely commonly demonstrated throughout the fossil record, which rarely shows an immediate "jump" from one species to the next, but rather shows gradual periods of coexisting ancestor and descendent species, followed by one or the other (or both) going extinct. -Silence 03:25, 31 January 2007 (UTC)

"but are dedicate to help the meek, the unloved, the poor, the hungry." - Compassion, empathy, and love are beneficial, not harmful, to our survival, especially in the long run. Organisms that are incapable of helping others will in turn be unlikely to be helped by others when they need it, and therefore will be selected against; in contrast, helpful organisms will foster mutually beneficial cooperation. Therefore caring about others is something that would be expected from natural selection, and is indeed what we find. See altruism in animals.

"How could this genetic code survive until today in a world where only the strongest surive." - Again, that's a misrepresentation of natural selection; survivability, not "strength", is what organisms tend towards. And one of the most effective strategies for survival is cooperation; waging war against everyone else, or ignoring others' interests, is less conducive to the survival of both a species and an individual, and therefore will tend to be weeded out of most populations.

"Surely a creature who did not help the outcasts of society would have a better chance of individual survival than one who did," - You are clearly mistaken. Even in our own society, anyone who rejected being social, kind, caring, etc. would surely become an outcast, and might even be thrown in prison. Being affable and caring towards others makes them like you; if they like you, they are likely to help you out, which wll improve your chances of surviving and reproducing. Groups are more effective at survival than individuals, so people tend naturally to develop traits which will be conducive towards forming groups, and ultimately, in the case of humans, super-groups called "societies". The very fact that humans are so often loving and even altruistic, and yet have become one of the dominant species of life on Earth, demonstrates what an effective, practical, and useful strategy this is for the survival of a species. Your assumption about the impracticality of love and caring is therefore demonstrably false.

"Just on human nature alone, humans capacity for good contrasting with their capacity for evil would seem to vindicate the Bible's story." - How so? Many human myths and books talk about, and try to account for, human good and evil. The Bible is no different from any of them: its claims lack any evidence, which is why they aren't taught in science classrooms, but in churches.

"People can be ruthless and cunning but they can just as easily be caring and loving." - Sure, but being indiscriminately ruthless doesn't have survival value. Of course, being indiscriminately caring doesn't either; we usually stop caring for people if they do horrible things for us, especially if we didn't know them very well. The fact that we care more for some people than for others, and that we tend to try to form close social networks, friendships, alliances, etc. with others, coheres entirely with the expected consequences of natural selection. Therefore the fact that humans are sometimes caring and loving, and at other times ruthless and cunning, depending on their situation, makes perfect sense in light of evolutionary history. -Silence 17:05, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

Science and skepticism

"The general public is too apathetic to be brainwashed." - That is an absurd statement; apathy is conducive to brainwashing. If you don't care, you're more likely to blindly accept what you're told. Therefore one would expect the public to be much more supportive of evolution than scientists (who base their ideas primarily on evidence, critical reasoning, etc.) if evolution's support was based on brainwashing. -Silence 17:05, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

I mean more skeptical of what scientists say.--Jorfer 18:14, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

??? Why would the general public be more skeptical than scientists of what scientists say? The general public is rarely informed enough to know what claims to be skeptical of and what claims not to be; that's how many useless alternative medicines and groundless conspiracy theories thrive, for example. If the general public was skeptical of everything scientists say, they'd never even visit the doctor. Why, then, would people be more skeptical of evolution than of countless other areas of science, despite the fact that evolution is much more well-supported by the evidence than most of the rest of science? The only explanation that makes any sense is that religious beliefs, not general skepticism of scientists, are what encourage people to be skeptical of evolution. This is the only explanation that makes any sense, and it makes perfect sense, because history tells us of similar controversies in the past, when people thought that science contradicted their religion (e.g., Galileo and Copernicus), and because the only people who dispute evolution are religious (specifically, they're creationists).

Your claim is an absurd one, because it not only makes no sense to claim that laypeople are "more skeptical of what scientists say", but it also makes no sense to claim that scientists aren't naturally skeptical of scientific claims: scientists have much more to gain than laypeople do from disputing erroneous scientific theories (heck, the scientists who have upset the scientific orthodoxy in the past, such as Albert Einstein, have been the ones who have been the most revered and celebrated of all time!), and scientists have a vastly better understanding of the concepts and evidence involved, giving them an infinitely better basis for being skeptical of poorly-supported or erroneous claims. So scientists both have dramatically better means, and dramatically strong motivations, for disputing evolution, if evolution is false, than laypeople do. And laypeople demonstrate no tendency whatsoever to be skeptical of science in general; indeed, laypeople are by and large a credulous bunch, willing to believe whatever authorities tell them is true. (The main difference is which authorities they trust: creationists trust religious authorities, while evolution-supporters either trust scientific authorities or are well-enough acquainted with the evidence to fully understand its basis on their own.) Everything indicates, thus, that your claim is actually the opposite of the truth: the public is infinitely less skeptical than scientists are (cf. scientific skepticism). -Silence 19:42, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

It is funny you mentioned doctors because when a new study comes out doctors are often quick to impliment the suggestions in the study before most of the general public does and it has often turned out that newer studies contradict older ones making the general public at least seem smarter. The general public skeptisism relies more on their "gut" feeling instead of lack of proof. This "gut" feeling is likely information processed by the subconscious from experience. There is usually at least some rational reason behind the many things the general public believes that scientists are so quick to dismiss. Yes, many scientists have been skeptical and challenged the scientific establishment but does this represent the majority? If most scientists are like doctors, then it would seem they spend more time building on widely accepted science then they do challenging fundamental priciples of it like Albert Einstein did. Am I saying that the general public is a bunch of geniouses, no, but I do think that scientists are too quick to underestimate the general public.--Jorfer 20:26, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

"This "gut" feeling is likely information processed by the subconscious from experience." - In part, sure (another aspect of such feelings is instinct, which is less experiential). But that doesn't make it reliable. I've had lots of "gut" feelings in the past that have turned out to be wrong; and I've had others that have turned out to be right. Gut feelings are actually wrong fairly often. For example, most racists have "gut feelings" that black people are inferior to them; only when their higher reasoning is appealed to and they abandon their impulses in favor of critical thinking are they likely to move past such intolerance. So, gut feelings (unlike, say, mathematics) are sometimes reliable, and sometimes unreliable; that means that we can't blindly accept whatever we "feel" is right, or we could easily be led astray. We need to check ourselves sometimes, and evaluate whether our gut feelings are misleading us. And to do so, we need to appeal (1) to critical reasoning, and (2) to evidence. Gut feelings shouldn't be ignored, but they shouldn't be blindly followed either; they should be evaluated and understood, so we can act accordingly.

"There is usually at least some rational reason behind the many things the general public believes that scientists are so quick to dismiss." - What do you mean by "rational"? I won't dispute that people have reasons for believing what they do, but those reasons are often bad ones. If they weren't, there wouldn't be nearly as much disagreement in the world today as there is, and bad reasoning patterns like fallacies wouldn't be so prevalent. Can you provide an example of something that the general public believes, that scientists are unduly "quick to dismiss"?

I think that most scientists want to challenge the majority, because people who do so are likely to earn fame, wealth, praise, etc. The kinds of people who upset the establishment are the kinds of people who win Nobel Prizes. Scientists who are just yesmen, in contrast, and don't propose any novel ideas which they can support with evidence, are destined to remain in obscurity. There is thus a strong motivation for all scientists to try to find ways to poke holes in established ideas, as long as they can back up such hole-poking with substantial evidence. The reason most scientists fail to poke those holes isn't because they don't want to, but rather because they lack the compelling evidence to do so. Many scientists have quite active imaginations, but unless they can put their ideas to practical use and provide compelling evidence to support them, they're not going to gain the acceptance of the scientific community; at best, they might sell some popular self-help books.

In addition to their desire to challenge the status quo, most scientists also have the ability to challenge the status quo, at least in their field of expertise. Scientists, unlike laypeople, tend to be well-trained in the scientific method, in reasoning, logic, and academic rigor in general. They tend to have more experience and learning than laypeople, and they tend to have access to equipment and other tools that allow for numerous tests of various scientific claims. Scientists thus have everything they would need to attack any scientific propposition that they want to, with logic, evidence, and a wealth of experience.

Why, then, aren't scientific revolutions more commonplace and everyday? Simply because the veracity of scientific claims rests on reproducible evidence, which tends naturally to rule out unsubstantiated views and popularize substantiated ones. When thousands of people, rather than just a few individuals, are working together to gain knowledge, it becomes less and less likely that any one of them will find evidence to upset the conclusions of the majority, because thousands of brains and millions of experiments tend naturally to be more reliable and conclusive than any one brain or any one set of experiments: science is built in such a way that it gets progressively more and more reliable results by pooling the intelligence and experimentation of millions of experts in various fields, which means that over time (1) scientific results become more and more reliable, and (2) it becomes less and less likely that any one well-established aspect of science will be overthrown (though it's always possible).

Science doesn't seem so stable because it's dogmatic, or because it resists change; it seems so stable because it is so well-grounded in centuries of gathered evidence that the vast majority of science (albeit not 100% of it) is exceedingly unlikely to be falsified in the foreseeable future. And, for the same reason, minor revisions are much more likely than major revolutions: most biologists will tell you that it is very likely that certain aspects of current evolutionary theory are likely to be revised in the future, just as certain aspects have been revised in the past; but they will also say that it's almost impossible that the whole theory will ever be overturned, simply because there's such an overwhelming amount of evidence supporting it; this is essentially the same answer you'll get from a physicist if you ask him about gravity, except that gravity is actually less certain than evolution, and a lot more likely to undergo significant revolution in the future, because there are more unanswered questions and anomalies in gravity than in evolution, by far.

Also, although many of Einstein's ideas were certainly revolutionary, you might be surprised to know that 99% of what he did was also just building on past cientific claims. Scientific revolutions really tend mostly to be minor revisions to existing ideas that end up having far-reaching consequences; although Einsteinian physics replaced Newtonian physics, Newtonian physics is still taught in pretty much every introductory physics class, because it's a near-perfect description of how things work, and only at a very, very small scale will this exceedingly close approximation of reality lead to noticeable errors. All new science is built on the evidence of old science; scientists, including revolutionary scientists, do not ignore decades or centuries of work. Rather, they build upon it, and only reject old, well-accepted claims when new evidence arises that compellingly falsifies them. This has not happened thus far for evolution, and there is no reason to believe that it will happen for evolution. -Silence 22:10, 28 January 2007 (UTC)

If you want an example of something the general public believes that scientists quickly dismiss, take one from the article, ESP. Many scientist consider ESP a pseudoscience, but I have seen some convincing twin telepathy experiments. Also, the idea that aliens from other worlds have visited earth was at once ridiculed by scientists, but now is slowly being accepted by the scientific community (see Panspermia). What do I believe on these issues? I think that twin telepathy exists because of the seperation of the spirit in the embryo and think that aliens are a deception from the devil. It may not be a scientific belief, but I do not limit myself to science. The Law of Electromagnetic Induction certainly existed before Faraday discover it, the relationship between matter and energy certainly did before Einstein discovered it, the Law of Fluid Dynamics before Bernoulli, and so forth so to dismiss the general publics beliefs from the article may well be premature.--Jorfer 00:53, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

• ESP is not a pseudoscience, because ESP is not a science; it's a claimed phenomenon, like ghosts or Bigfoot. Parapsychology, which concerns itself with the study of ESP, is what you really meant to be talking about, as this is the field that many scientists dismiss as pseudoscience. There is no compelling evidence for ESP, and countless thousands of experiments which attempted to show such evidence have demonstrated no real sign of it; the few studies that are touted as compelling by are genuinely flawed, cherry-picked, or misleading, and have consistently failed to provide reproducible, consistent anomalous results of any sort (see Joseph Banks Rhine#Criticism). Personally, I do not consider the entire field of parapsychology to be pseudoscientific, because some of the research is genuinely scientific and well-done (though, strangely enough, this research tends to produce the fewest anomalous results). However, whether it's pseudoscientific or not, there's a strong case to be made for it being a useless dead-end of a field, considering how many fruitless decades and millions of dollars have been wasted to no real results. The primary arguments for parapsychology being pseudoscientific are not that ESP is simply false, but rather that the methods of most parapsychologists are scientifically lacking: they fail to provide coherent or consistent hypotheses, they regularly skew and cherry-pick evidence and misrepresent statistics, they make no predictions and fail to provide a method for falsifying their claims. They also rely frequently on vague, unscientific language, which allows for easy equivocation. Their claims are thus comparable to the claims of astrologists, which are similarly widely considered pseudoscientific, even though there has occasionally been a strange anomaly in research into the area (none of which has provided remotely conclusive evidence for the influence of stars on human lives, just as nothing has provided remotely conclusive evidence for the possibility of thoughts, or "spirit", directly influencing matter from a distance).
• And "twin telepathy" clearly has nothing to do with real telepathy (i.e., contact between minds at a distance); a much simpler exlpanation is that the twins' behavior is significantly influenced by their genetics. There is no other reason for twins, who are unique for being genetically alike, to demonstrate seeming "telepathy", while no other humans have succeeded in doing so, and while the twins fail to do so with anyone other than each other. What's really happening isn't direct mind-to-mind communication with the twins, but rather such similar brain composition between the two twins that, when put in similar situations, they are sometimes able to guess what the other is thinking based on what they themselves are thinking. It's like trying to second-guess yourself, albeit a bit more complicated and unusual because the other twin has presumably had a lot of different experiences from the first twin, thus making it remarkable (but certainly not evidence of a direct psychic link!) that the two remain so similar in thinking patterns. This sort of stuff would be relevant in an argument about "nature vs. nurture"; it is irrelevant in a discussion about parapsychology, since it has such a clear-cut biological explanation, even if it's a surprising one. The evidence supposedly supporting twin telepathy is purely anecdotal in any case; all scientific studies on the matter have provided no evidence for anything more remarkable than the presence of similar thinking patterns and preferences.[1]
• Most scientists do not accept the idea of panspermia, and most of the general public who believe in extraterrestrials don't have beliefs remotely resembling panspermia, but rather have cruder beliefs in things like big-headed black-eyed green dudes who pick up cattle and create crop circles. To conflate these two beliefs is like conflating quarks with pixie dust. But panspermia is a rather implausible, albeit interesting, hypothesis; its greatest weakness, obviously, is that no extraterrestrial life has ever been discovered, which effectively invalidates the idea that all life is extraterrestrial in origin until it can even be demonstrated to be possible. It is misleading to say that panspermia is "slowly being accepted", as this suggests that there is a gradual ongoing process of more and more scientists accepting it which will lead to the hypothesis being near-universally accepted; there is no reason to believe that this is the case, and such speculation can only reflect the bias of those who have had undue exposure to one specific, especially sensationalistic hypothesis for the origin of life, and seems to have relatively little interest in the many other, more well-supported hypotheses. This is not to rule out panspermia, but conflating panspermia with little green men is patently absurd, and inflating or exaggerating the level of evidence or scientific support for panspermia (or the odds that this is very likely to dramatically increase in the future) is very short-sighted.
• "I think that twin telepathy exists because of the seperation of the spirit in the embryo" - What is a "spirit"? What makes you think that spirits exist? Moreover, what makes you think that there is anything scientific about the religious and mythological belief in "spirits"?
• "and think that aliens are a deception from the devil" - ...... I guess that was a silly question? XD!
• "but I do not limit myself to science." - Neither do I. ... Except when I'm trying to explain natural phenomena. When I'm trying to write a poem, I don't resort solely to science. When I'm trying to enjoy a hot bath, I don't resort solely to science. But when I'm trying to understand the natural world, science is the only demonstrably reliable method for gaining information and knowledge about the way the world works. Ignoring it, or appealing to extrascientific beliefs, serves only to dilute its usefulness, not to complement it. To try to use irrational ways of thought (like intuition and faith) to explain the natural world is like trying to use science to paint a picture; it's an abuse of what could be very valuable in the right context, but is being misused when applied to the domain of reason, evidence, and science.
• "and so forth so to dismiss the general publics beliefs from the article may well be premature." - Nonsense. History shows that in over 99% of all cases where the general public has disagreed with science, science has turned out to be right, or at least to be much more right than the general public. I can't think of a single example, in fact, where the opposite occurred, and expert scientists in the field turned out to be wrong while the general public was right; in almost all cases, where science has erred, it's been other scientists, not non-scientists, who have noticed, and remedied, the oversight. There is therefore no reason to believe that an unscientific belief of the general public is remotely likely to become acecpted science at any time in the future.
• Moreover, even if there was a reason to believe that some of these beliefs will become accepted science, there is no way to discern which ones will be so fortunate, so to arbitrarily pick a few of them is much more irrational and presumptive than scientists are, for remaining equally skeptical of all such unsubstantiated views until conclusive evidence for them arises. Arbitrarily picking and choosing which irrational, unsupported beliefs to hold to is much more likely to lead you to error than the scientific way of remaining skeptical and doubtful about them all. -Silence 07:31, 29 January 2007 (UTC)

Fair enough, but there are many people who will support the general public more than I will; I mean America is a Representative Democracy. It is only fair to include there views in examining the public support.--Jorfer 00:05, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

The American government is democratic. American science is decidedly non-democratic. Science is not decided by vote, and it certainly isn't decided by popular opinion. Rather, science is ultimately determined by weighing the evidence, testing predictions, experimentation, etc.; unpopular views regularly rise to prominence in science because they turn out to be so well-supported by the evidence. (Heck, evolution is a perfect example of such a view!) To demand that science classrooms conform to the will of the masses, even though those masses have no scientific expertise and have no evidence on the side of many of their views, is to destroy what makes science science: a principled adherence to evidence and rational argument, rather than mere popularity. It will turn science into pure politics; and experience tells us that politics is a much less productive, and much more corrupting and blindly bureaucratic, institution than science is. Similarly, Wikipedia is not a democracy; nor does Wikipedia owe any special allegiance to America, or any other country in the world. The reason we include unsupported views in articles sometimes is because they're noteworthy, not because it's more democratic to do so. But we can only do so when specific, reliable references are provided to support the inclusion of such views; WP:NOR forbids us going further than that. So, I have no problem with adding noteworthy, relevant, well-cited creationist views to Level of support for evolution; but we can't simply interject our own views without citations. -Silence 00:59, 30 January 2007 (UTC)

Comparing evolution and creationism

I left one more comment above and I am moving new discussion down here as it is getting crowded up there.

You have defended evolution quite nicely, but that does not necessarily mean that creationism is a worse idea. I will compare both beliefs now instead of just attack evolution.

How about co-dependent biological systems such as DNA and RNA ribosomes and proteins. Wouldn't these "chicken and egg conudrums" be more consistent with the creationist view of a sudden creation rather than the gradual naturalistic process of forming the "common ancestor"?--Jorfer 03:33, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

If you permit me to intrude, you are pointing out a fundamental difference between evolution and creationism. It is part of what makes science work. Scientific explanations are never quite complete. There are always things that are not completely understood, or things that might be changed later. the exact details of how life began and DNA and RNA came to be is still not understood; it might never be understood. Nevertheless, what science does is views these as puzzles to solve. It ponders them. It does experiments. It tries out ideas. Ideas that fail are discarded. It gropes along in a sort of trial and error fashion. And what the last few hundred years have shown us is that this clumsy groping trial and error technique (a principal part of the "scientific method") actually has worked at discovering things in many cases. That is, the rules and theories that are developed this way can be used to predict successfully the results of other measurements and other experiments. So much so that we use this procedure to develop new medications and new science that we base all our mondern technology on. Without this method, there would be no cell phone, no computer, no internet, no antibiotics, no plastics, no molecular biology, etc. It all comes from scientists finding a puzzle and trying to solve it. Now, creationism works in a very different way. In creationism, you know the answer to the puzzle already. At most what is done is an attempt to try to explain how the experiments and measurements that you have will fit the answer you already know. The answer you already know is never discarded. In fact, many creation scientists and creationists state that if there is a decision to be made between the data and the bible, the bible is always right, and the data if it disagrees must be discarded. Of course, many will try to tell you that the data never disagree, but this is not true. So in this sense, creationism is the opposite of science. Also, creationism includes the supernatural, which is also not science. So for these two reasons (and a few more) creationism is not science. That does not mean creationism is false, only that we cannot accommodate it as this thing we call science. I have no objection to people believing it, or teaching it as religion or philosophy, but as long as we are clear: it is not science.--Filll 04:20, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

The scientific method begins with hypothesis if I am not mistaken. I think that it is just as much science to test for Biblically-based hypotheses then it is to test for any other hypothesis. Last time I checked, science is not just random testing, but testing with a purpose.--Jorfer 04:33, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually, sometimes there is a hypothesis in science, and sometimes not. This is one of the major misconceptions that the public has, mainly because of our lousy teaching. Scientists do not actually make explicit hypotheses a large fraction of the time. And there is nothing wrong with "testing biblically-based hypotheses" except for one big problem. The biblically-based hypothesis has to be allowed to fail, or it is not science. And to creationists, the hypothesis never fails. So creationism is not science.--Filll 04:41, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Most Creationists will not claim that an experiment succeded if it did not, but instead claim experimental error. I think it is only fair creationists be given the same time in verifying the results of experiments and ability to deny its connotations to the larger theory as any other scientist. Michelson and Morley, for example, took twenty years verifying their experimental results and denied that it disproved Aether theory to their deaths, yet their experiment is still considered science (see Michelson–Morley experiment and Edward Morley).--Jorfer 00:57, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

No one is taking any time away from creationists. Creationists are allowed to test all they like. However, they have been doing this for a good 150 years since "Origin of Species" was published, and before that with its predecessors. In all that time, there has been no progress, no evidence, no results, no evidence, no publications, nothing. A big fat zero. They have made no progress with their fellow scientists, which is normally what has to be done to get a scientific theory accepted. In fact, the level of support for creationism appears to be decreasing with time, not increasing, as new evidence from molecular biology and other experimental results bolster the theory of evolution. Creationists and creation scientists are free to try to come up with contradictory evidence. Until they do, it should not be included in textbooks as proven, just as we do not put other unproven theories in textbooks. It should not be taught as accepted theory or even an accepted hypothesis, because it is not. It does not satisfy any of the standard rules for science, as the supreme court has found on a couple of occasions, and several federal and state courts have found as well. It is the finding of the courts that is religion, not science, and we are a nation of laws. And the courts have ruled, and their rulings have the force of law. But in their private institutes with private money, creationists are free to try to prove their theories. And if they do, then they will be subject to the same tests any other scientific theory is subject to. It does not matter if creationists claim a result or not that is true, or false. What matters is if other scientists can reproduce it, and then agree with their conclusions. That is how science is done. The creationists cannot declare something true and then get others to accept it based on their declaration with no testing. --Filll 02:54, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

It takes a longer time to test something when you have few scientists that would give the idea of creationism the light of day so you have to rely on a very small group trying to do the research for an entire theory. You do not give creationists enough credit. We do have the evidence of irreducible complexity growing. All data so far, illustrates that life at its most basic is still too complex to have arisen by itself given that earth, it has been discovered, was not the conducive primordial soup neccesary for the first organism to have arived naturally. Evolutionists have still been unable to duplicate a more basic form of life then the Thermoplasma Acidphilum with approximatly 1,509 genes which gives it a 10 to the 112,500 power of simultaneously being created based on Hubert P. Yockey's research into cytochrome C.--Jorfer 03:22, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

I am not a biologist and I cannot keep up with all the claims. However, there are biologists that do keep up with all the claims, Like the biologists who testified at the Dover case 1 year ago. And every claim of irreducible complexity was proven false in the court room, with a huge amount of evidence. So I do not know about the Thermoplasma Acidphilum, but I would not be willing to claim that this is irreducibly complex, just like the last 50 or 100 biological systems that creationists claimed were irreducibly complex and then it was proven that they were incorrect. This does not mean they will not find something. They might. But until they do, there will be no scientific support for it. And it certainly will not be in textbooks or publicly funded science classrooms. There is no rush. If it takes them 50 years or 100 years more to prove their case, then fine. I do not care. Let them try, with their private money. If and when they have something, then others will listen. Until then, they cannot expect people to believe them. Science is very hard and cold in that way; it depends on very high standards. That is why science is respected. Because it really is about making verifiable predictions. If they cannot be made, then the hypothesis is discarded. And 99.9% of all hypotheses are discarded. It is a very high standard.--Filll 04:50, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

For hundreds of years, most scientists were creationists (as a consequence of their religion, not their science—and because they couldn't imagine a remotely plausible alternative). Yet creationism was never scientific, because no experiments ever supported creationism; creationism never made any testable predictions; creationism had no explanatory value or use (because the mechanisms and cause of creationism were ineffable and inexplicable by definition). The reason for the fall of creationism was that a plausible alternative (evolution) finally arose, and turned out to be incredibly well-supported by the evidence; if creationism and evolution contradict, and all the evidence is on evolution's side, the more empirically-minded people (of which scientists tend to be, more so than the general populace) will favor evolution, while the more dogmatically-minded people (i.e., those who value religious doctrine over their own observations: "if my eyes contradict God, my eyes must be lying") tend to favor creationism (or some other arbitrary religious teaching, depending on their faith). If creationism was remotely likely to ever become acceptable science, then it would almost certainly have done so back when most scientists were creationists: for example, if anything in the fossil record, comparative anatomy, etc. had ever suggested creationism, then the creationist majority would have jumped on this as "proof" of their religious beliefs. It's because the evidence was (and remains) so profoundly lacking that intellectually honest scientists declined to do this. There is no evidence that life at its most basic was too complex to have arisen by natural methods. You are advised to acquaint yourself with the numerous theories of abiogenesis. Creationists who claim that there is any evidence that the early primordial soup was inadequate for the formation of life are either misinformed or simply lying, and the fact that scientists have not created life is no more reason to doubt evolution or abiogenesis than the fact that scientists have not created the Big Bang is evidence against that theory, or the fact that scientists have not created a planet is evidence against the Earth being round. -Silence 05:04, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

I might add again, Newton was a "creationist" although probably an Arianist or a Unitarian, which would not get a very friendly reception in most fundamentalist US faiths these days. And Newton spent a huge amount of time trying desperately to "prove" the bible. He was maybe one of the smartest men that ever lived. And he came up empty. He used his brains and his reason and his incredible scientific ability, and failed. He tested creationism and other things from biblical literalism, and they failed, basically. That is why we do not remember him for that; we remember him for the science he did that worked, not the science that he did that failed.--Filll 05:25, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually a second problem is the creationist's reliance on magic. I cannot actually test to see if something magical happened or not. All I can do is declare that something happened by magic. For example, let's say we wanted to test to see if a pastor can change water into wine. He tries, and fails. What went wrong? Maybe it is the wrong pastor. Maybe he is not a good enough believer. Maybe God is angry at him. Maybe it did change into wine but no one can tell because it looks and tastes like water. Maybe the devil kept it from changing. Maybe it did change very fast and changed back. Maybe God wants to keep it from changing to test our faith. And so on. So you see, it is IMPOSSIBLE for the Pastor to ever fail to change water into wine. Especially if you have true believers involved. The believers will always claim that the pastor can change water into wine, no matter what the results of the test are. Wine will turn into Jesus' blood at every communion. Prayers will get answered even though we cannot prove it with statistical tests. So unless biblical hypotheses are allowed to fail, and supernatural causes are allowed to fail, you cannot test them. Because no matter what result you get, you might be mistaken because some magic happened.

Your wine example is bad because you CAN prove that he failed to change the water to wine; you just cannot prove why it failed to change because their are too many variables involved like most experiment that attempts to answer why. The two reasons that involved it actually CAN be tested; For the wine that has different properties and the quick change to wine and back, you can use quality chemical analysis with a mass spectrometer, and if it is too quick to measure, it reflects a physical or technological boundary, and that would mean it is at least a currently untestable hypothesis.--Jorfer 00:57, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

• Note: I am not Catholic and do not believe that the wine turns to blood as is easily verifiable through the senses and though statistics would indicate that God does not answer prayer, it really only indicates that he does not answer them in the way we expect.

No if true believers are involved, you can not prove that water changed into wine, because they will say it did, no matter how it looks or tastes or what scientific tests you use. This has been shown over and over for other similar sorts of things. If you really believe, the belief is more important that the facts. Many creationists have said this over and over. If a result disagrees with the bible, the result must be discarded because the bible is never wrong. So you will not win even if you present 100 or 1000 years of evidence that water did not turn into wine. They will claim it did and you could not measure it because that proves it was a miracle that the equipment failed. They will claim it changed when you were not looking. They will claim all kinds of things. But you cannot prove it to the satisfaction of a true believer once magic and the supernatural is involved.--Filll 02:54, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

I might add that Duane Gish, a prominent creationist, has claimed on several occasions that no scientific tests can prove creationism because it is supernatural. And in this case, I believe he is correct.--Filll 05:25, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

It is not fair to generalize and say that speaks of all creationists, though. Some, like me, are willing to listen to logic.--Jorfer 02:59, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

You are quite right. All creationists are not the same. And they should realize how different they are. There are at least 7 or 8 major types and maybe another 50 or 100 minor types. All who claim they have scientific and biblical proof for their particular variety. All who claim all the other 49 or 99 types of creationists are wrong, not doing real science, not following the bible correctly, stupid, satanists, atheists, blasphemers, infidels, etc. So it is definitely true that not all creationists agree. I would encourage you and all creationists to learn about all the different varieties of creationists, and what they believe, and what they base those beliefs on. It might be quite enlightening to confront the diversity and the fervor of belief.--Filll 04:54, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

To be fair, scientists do not agree on everything either (the overall theory of evolution is an exception).--Jorfer 05:03, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Once a theory is very well established, like evolution, with a huge amount of evidence, then it gets much more unanimous support. The Theory of Gravity is far more controversial and far less certain than the theory of evolution, as far as scientific theories go. There is a very good chance you will see the theory of gravity fall in your life time, and very little chance you will see the theory of evolution collapse. Also, if creationists really wanted to be concerned about a part of science that directly impacted faith in the bible, gravity is a better choice than evolution, because gravity is tied up with the creation of time and space itself, the creation of all matter and the universe. Evolution is small potatoes; it only is about why cats and squirrels are different than lizards and where they come from. Scientist are even doing experiments about making their own universes in the laboratory, so that is far more threatening to theology I would say than worrying about whether chimps are our cousins or not.--Filll 05:25, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

In addition, there is a third problem. Once you have an answer to your puzzle, you sstop looking. So you would get no more scientific answers to your puzzle since the puzzle is solved. And science would stop. That is why creationism is pure poison to science. It will kill science. And we will end up with religious police arresting scientists for finding answers the churches disagree with, which is what used to happen a few hundred years ago.--Filll 04:50, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Creationism would never be accepted by the whole scientific community in unanimity. If creationism is the best explanation, then it should be the accepted theory regardless of where it leads. It would not end science as it would be in the process of constantly being verified and there are many details within creationism that would have to be filled in. Creationism would not be the end of science as the prominent creationists Michael Faraday could tell you. He believed in the 100% literal word of the Bible and last time I checked, he discovered the Law of Electromagnectic Induction. If creationism is the best explanation of life, then it is a waste of resources to spend time developing evolution as the research dollars could go to something more useful.--Jorfer 00:57, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

No theory is ever accepted by 100% of the scientific community. Or very rarely anyway. Once you have magic involved in science, so if you have a problem you cannot solve, you just decree it solved by magic and then stop working. That is a terrible precedent and it would be the death knell of science. Suppose you did not want to do your homework and just went to school and told your teacher it was done by magic, a miracle, but she cannot see it, because it miraculously disappeared. And she was forced to give you an A for it. That is what it is like.--Filll 02:54, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Faraday lived 100 years before the advent of evolutionary theory, and his personal religious beliefs had nothing to do with his science (you might as well argue that deism is a political theory because Jorferferson was a deist), so I fail to see the relevance of his views here; before evolution, most scientists were creationists. Since then, as a result of evolution's overwhelming supporting evidence, essentially all biologists have either become non-creationists, or have accepted theistic evolution. This shows how human knowledge progresses over time, as our initial assumptions (e.g., creationism) are corrected by the new evidence; although creationism might be a comforting view for some people, it certainly has absolutely no evidence in its support, and mountains of evidence contradicting it. Creationism is thus much like many other religious beliefs; there is nothing whatsoever about creationism that makes it any more scientific than any other religious view. -Silence 01:12, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

• "The scientific method begins with hypothesis if I am not mistaken. I think that it is just as much science to test for Biblically-based hypotheses then it is to test for any other hypothesis." - Tests such as..? It seems to me that you are using the temr hypothesis a bit too losely: by your standards, Flat Earth and deism are hypotheses as well. By normal scientific standards, however, a hypothesis must be testible, falsifiable, parsimonious (conforming to Occam's Razor), consistent with other scientific theories, and, in most cases, applicable to multiple phenomena or events. -Silence 06:34, 1 February 2007 (UTC)

Abiogenesis and biochemistry

Evidence is currently against a primordial soup. The ingredients for a primordial soup just are not there. For example, adenine and guanine require freezing conditions to synthesize, but cytosine and uracil require boiling temperatures. In order for all of them to synthesize at once requires the primordial soup to freeze and boil at the same time.

• This is not entirely accurate; the primordial soup would not need to freeze and boil at the same time, and even if it did, it would not need to freeze and boil at the same time in the same place. Just as is the case today, the ancient Earth had areas of boiling and frozen water at varying times and places. For some periods, the oceans boiled; for others, the oceans froze over; and for the majority, there was boiling and frozen water at different places simultaneously. Once cytosine and uracil were synthesized at the high temperatures, and adening and guanine at the low, there would be no difficulty in the four synthesizing in the areas between these two extremes. It may not be likely—no one claims that it was likely for life to arise on Earth, it's merely a fact that it did—but it's certainly not impossible, and it actually has evidence in support of it, unlike intelligent design, which has no evidential support—only theological support. -Silence 02:57, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

The main other theory to the ingrediants origin is space, but "amino acids are highly susceptible to UV photodestruction even under exposure to UV photons of relatively low energy."

Reverence: P. Ehrenfreund et al., "The Photostability of Amino Acids in Space," Astrophysical Journal Letters 550 (2001) p. L98 --Jorfer 16:55, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

It is true that this is a significant criticism of pangenesis, but you are the only one here who has proposed or come close to endorsing that hypothesis, so taking the time to attack your own proposal is just beating down a straw man: the overwhelming majority of scientists do not accept pangenesis, and even those who do must eventually have a point of abiogenesis for the extraterrestrial life itself, else they will succumb to an infinite regress. You are inaccurately and misleadingly exaggerating the level of scientific support for pangenesis in order to over-emphasize the significance of criticisms of pangenseis to biology in general; I could just as easily inaccurately and misleading exaggerate the level of support for a Flat Earth among creationists and then attack Flat Earthers alone in an attempt to discredit creationism in general, but that would be equally dishonest.

Additionaly, as applied to abiogenesis in general, this argument is entirely inaccurate. UV radiation would be an influence both in outer space and in the early Earth, but would actually be more beneficial than destructive for the formation of early life, at least on the more UV-limited environment of Earth. "When simple organic molecules are held together in a fairly concentrated area, such as stuck to a dust or ice grain, the UV light actually enhances the formation of more complex molecules by breaking some bonds and allowing the molecules to recombine. DNA and RNA are relatively resistant to UV light, because some parts of the molecules shelter others and damage to the bases can provide the materials to repair the backbone. UV light gives nucleic acids a selective advantage and may in fact have been an essential ingredient for abiogenesis." References:

1. Bernstein, M. P., S. A. Sandford, L. J. Allamandola, J. S. Gillette, S. J. Clemett and R. N. Zare. 1999. UV irradiation of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in ices: Production of alcohols, quinones, and ethers. Science 283: 1135-1138. See also: Ehrenfreund, P., 1999. Molecules on a space odyssey. Science 283: 1123-1124.

2. Cooper, G. et al. 2001. Carbonaceous meteorites as a source of sugar-related organic compounds for the early Earth. Nature 414: 879-883. See also: Sephton, M. A., 2001. Life's sweet beginnings? Nature 414: 857-858.

3. Mulkidjanian, A. Y., D. A. Cherepanov and M. Y. Galperin. 2003. Survival of the fittest before the beginning of life: selection of the first oligonucleotide-like polymers by UV light. BMC Evolutionary Biology 3:12. http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2148/3/12/abstract

4. Mullen, Leslie. 2003. Shining light on life's origin. Astrobiology Magazine, http://www.astrobio.net/news/article492.html

-Silence 02:57, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I left out two other studies. A study by Curt Mileikowsky found that UV cosmic radiation can penetrate up to thirty-nine inches in meteorites and comets, destroying all organics and another study by Daniel Glavin and Jorferfrey Bada of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography showed that amino acids in interplanetary grains would be heated by the atmosphere to at least 1,020 degrees Fahreinheit which would incenerate all amino acids except possibly glycine.

References 1: Curt Mileikowsky et al., "Natural Transfer of Viable Microbes in Space. 1. From Mars to Earth and Earth to Mars," Icarus 145 (2000), pp. 391-427; C. Mileikowsky et al., "Risks Threatening Viable Transfer of Microbes Betweenn Bodies in Our Solar System," Planetary and Space Science 48 (2000), pp. 1107-1115.

Reference 2: Daniel P. Glavin and Jorferfrey L. Bada, "Survival of Amino Acids in Micrometeorites During Atmospheric Entry," Astrobiology 1 (2001), pp.259-269

--Jorfer 04:19, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

It doesn't matter, because I agree with you, and have agreed with you since before we even meet: pangenesis is a silly idea, and doesn't give us any good information about the actual origin of life. It's one of the less well-supported abiogenetic hypotheses, not one of the more well-supported ones; singling it out is a rhetorical tactic. The references I provided were to make clear the UV radiation is not problematic for terrestrial abiogenesis (a fairly common misconception among creationists), not to dispute that it is problematic for extraterrestrial abiogenesis. -Silence 06:11, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

• "How about co-dependent biological systems such as DNA and RNA. Wouldn't these "chicken and egg conudrums" be more consistent with the creationist view of a sudden creation rather than the gradual naturalistic process of forming the "common ancestor"?" - This amounts to a variant on the refuted notion of irreducible complexity. The basic form of this argument is that a certain biological system is interdependent, meaning that it could not have arisen naturally: if you take away any one piece of the system, the entire system ceases to function. Thus, it is impossible for such a structure to have evolved by the sort of incremental, gradual process required by Darwinism. An older form of this argument is present in rhetorical questions like "what use is half an eye?" or "what use is half a wing?". It questions how the present state of species could ever have come to be, if it would be entirely nonfunctional in an incomplete form. Your argument essentially takes irreducible complexity to its logical extreme: how could the basic building blocks of life have formed, if they are clearly so interdependent, requiring each others' prior existence to have their functions? This is not an absurd question. However, it is an answered question. Specifically, there are two answers.
• The first answer is: a system can evolve from having independent parts to having interdependent parts. Just because we can't remove a piece of certain biological systems and have them remain functional doesn't mean that those systems couldn't have been put together: such removal is trying to dispute evolution by disproving the opposite of evolution. A system could start with one component; it could then add a second component, which the first component is not dependent upon; however, the first component could then evolve (often for the sake of efficient energy usage) to become dependent upon the second component, thus giving the appearance of irreducible complexity after-the-fact. It has also been demonstrated that irreducibly complex structures can be formed through biological "scaffolding": consider the analogy of an arch. Stone arches are irreducibly complex; if you remove any stone from the archway, the entire thing will collapse. Yet it is easy to build an archway: all that is needed is to use a scaffolding to hold up the arch's stones until the entire arch is complete. Then the thing will be stable enough to support itself, and the scaffolding can be removed. This is exactly analogous to how evolution often works: a "scaffolding" may be necessary for a system to form in the first place, but once the system is complete, the scaffolding becomes unnecessary and will eventually shrink or vanish altogether due to selective pressures to increase efficiency (cf. vestigial structure). It is thus clearly possible for a biological structure that we cannot reduce to have evolved. The second answer is: a system can change its function over time. This is, indeed, an extremely important evolutionary mechanism, called exaptation. A structure might start with one function, then later be adapted to a new function; irreducibly complex systems might start as having one function in which each structure serves a distinct role, then be adapted through evolution to serve a function which would be impossible without the entire system being in place.

The example of an arch actually helps the case that irreducible complexity leads to a creator because people (intelligent designers) have to make the scaffolding and put it up and from an evolutionary view you have to put a lot of energy into it before getting any benefit so it is a burden on the host and will be selected against before it is developed (hey, survival is tough, after all, only one in a thousand creatures have made it until today).--Jorfer 02:37, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

A famous old story says, just because you cannot figure out how to solve the problem with evolution, does not mean that someone else cannot figure out how to solve the problem with evolution. Like the Behe claims- the scientists came up with about 12 mechanisms to court and shot him down. And hundreds of articles and books that proved him wrong. --Filll 02:57, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Stone arches arise in nature too. Naturally occurring arches of stone are formed by weathering away bits of stone from a large concretion that has formed previously. Irreducibly complex structures can form in the same way: a larger structure becomes simplified through natural selection, turning independent substructures into interdependent ones. Moreover, the scaffolding can certainly serve a selective purpose in its own right; it's just that when the circumstances change and its former function is rendered obsolete, it is no longer useful to organisms and will tend to degenerate. "Scaffolding" is a metaphor in any case: there needn't be a distinct, separate structure "supporting" the parts of an interdependent system for this effect to occur. It may simply be the case that a certain component of that system evolves from being independent to being interdependent over time for the sake of efficiency, since there is often no selective advantage at all to preserving the reducibility of a system. -Silence 05:04, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

It could be argued that God created the arches and creating a flagella is way more difficult then wearing away a piece of rock.--Jorfer 17:58, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

A snowflake is more difficult to create than a rock. Does that imply that snowflakes are more "designed" than rocks? Obviously not. Complexity alone does not imply intelligent design. Additionally, in recent years the evolution of flagella has become remarkably well-understood, and no longer represents a significant gap in our understanding of how various organic structures evolved. Just as the evolution of the eye was once erroneously thought to be problematic for evolutionary theory before the evidence really started mounting, modern creationist claims of irreducible complexity are similarly weak, and ammount to God of the gaps arguments and arguments from ignorance. -Silence 02:57, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

• With regards specifically to your DNA-RNA example, the answer to your question is actually an easy one: RNA doesn't need DNA to form. Wherever you heard this is not a reliable source of information; RNA is fully capable of catalyzing its own duplication. However, I took this time to analyze the irreducible complexity argument in-depth because I wanted to hammer home the reason why scientists don't consider this a series or problematic objection. There is no evidence that any irreducibly complex system could not have evolved. Moreover, there is a more fundamental problem with the idea that irreducible complexity somehow supports the idea of an intelligence: really, irreducible complexity is still not an argument for creationism, but rather just an argument against evolution. The latter does not somehow magically become the former; to claim that creationism and evolution are the only options is a clear false dilemma, as there are millions of other options at least as likely as creationism out there. (For example, compare Biblical creationism with Raëlism.) To be scientific, it is not sufficient for creationists to make a fallacious argument from incredulity like "I don't see how evolution could have done X, so creationism must be true!" Rather, positive evidence for creationism, not just negative evidence against evolution (of which there is none anyway), is necessary to make creationism remotely feasible.

My mistake, I meant ribsomes and proteins (RNA and DNA just make such a good couple).--Jorfer 02:37, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

The proteins created by ribosomes are not a prerequisite for life, so this is a non-issue, and certainly not a problem. As far as I know, ribosomes do not depend for their existence upon the proteins they construct. Additionally, RNA, which is considered to predate DNA and ribosomes, is not dependent upon ribosomes. RNA can catalyze its own duplication, and could form from simpler precursors, such as peptide nucleic acids. -Silence 05:04, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Ribosomes are involved in the translation phase of Protein biosynthesis. If this process does not apply to all protein biosynthesis, then this is a perfect opportunity to mention that on the page.--Jorfer 15:56, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

I am honestly not well-acquainted enough with protein biosynthesis to provide a satisfactory response to your points. For that reason, I went to ask some people who are more informed on this topic to respond to your point. Perplexed in Peoria responded to your point thusly:

"This claim, as worded, is not quite right, but at core there is a valid creationist argument against naturalistic abiogenesis here. Not a killing objection IMHO, but a valid argument pointing to a problem that has not been solved yet.

"Proteins do (in modern organisms) do require ribisomes to form. Oh, there are some small polypeptides (antibiotics and such) that are built by a variety of ad hoc mechanisms, but it is safe to say that 'proteins' are all built on ribosomes.

"But saying that ribosomes require proteins to be formed is a bit of an exaggeration in the context of abiogenesis. Yes, today you can't build ribosomes without the help of proteins at various stages - transcription, splicing, maturation, etc. In fact, some parts of modern ribosomes are made of proteins. But abiogenesis researchers are confident that the original ribosomes could have been built without protein involvement.

"But the chicken-egg problem doesn't stop there. A ribosome doesn't do any good unless you also have a way of attaching amino acids to the right tRNAs, ways of synthesizing the amino acids, ways of generating phosphate bond energy, etc. And all of those steps, today, are done by proteins. And there are no clues in modern biochemistry to suggest that they were ever done in any other way.

"So a creationist would say that this protein-synthesis system as a whole is an example of 'irreducible complexity'. I would have to respond, 'Yes it is. Perhaps the best example. We have no idea today how this complex system came about. But the structure of the system contains clues that it must have come about by evolution. For example, the fact that ribosomes are mostly made of RNA practically screams 'Evolution did it!' Because a Designer, if intelligent, would have made the ribosome out of pure protein, as was done for every other large structure that has appeared more recently.'"

So, like abiogenesis in general, this is not yet a very well-understood area of biology, and you are correct to focus on it if your aim is to find the "gaps" in what evolutionary biology has already convincingly explained; in-depth research into this area is still very young, and exciting new results are being reported all the time, but there is still much that we do not know. However, on the other hand, there is no indication that any of the things we do not know are impossible. John Harshman noted that "Ribosomes contain proteins, but they work even if you remove all the protein, leaving only RNA. The proteins just make them work better". There is thus no reason to believe that ribosomes could not have evolved, and to try to argue this point based merely on our lack of knowledge is an argument from ignorance. -Silence 02:57, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Prophecy

It is disturbing how similar Raelism is to the Great Deception of the Bible, Benjamin Creme is to the False Prophet, and that Maitreya in the Hebrew number game adds up to 666. Look it up for yourself.--Jorfer 02:37, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Yes, yes, and "Hitler" and "Ronald Wilson Reagan" and billions of other random word combinations produce 666 as well. We're all used to this postdictional silliness; how many millions of people have been claimed by Christians at one time or another to be the False Prophet or Antichrist? It's just comical at this point. (Incidentally, "666" was never the number of the beast; that was a scribal error. The correct number was 616, and historians agree that it probably referred to the Emperor Nero.) -Silence 05:04, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

None of those people perfectly fitted the description in 2 Thessalonians 2:4, "He will oppose and will exalt himself over everything that is called God or is worshiped, so that he sets himself up in God's temple, proclaiming himself to be God." [2] Why would Nero have to be revealed and why would they expect him to perform "counterfeit miracles, signs and wonders" in that same chapter? If the Bible trying to imply that it was Nero they did a very bad job.--Jorfer 05:29, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Actually, the dominant theory among biblical scholars, in divinity schools etc, is that the Revelations of St. John the Divine was a coded discussion of the Roman empire in the early part of the millenium. I am not sure if Nero was referenced in it, but more of the historical facts fit that explanation, as a political commentary, than just about any other. And most of the stuff about the rapture etc is not in the bible at all, but was dreamed by a young girl who had a fever about 150-200 years ago, and who was hallucinating.--Filll 05:57, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Academics don't claim that the prophecies of Revelations were ever fulfilled. They merely point out that Nero was almost certainly who the original authors were writing about when they described the "Beast", as confirmed by writers such as St. Augustine (and affirmed by the Roman Catholic Church in general). -Silence 05:57, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

You cannot trust the Catholic Church on this issue because the Roman Catholic Church has an incentive to cover it up as it is so similar to the woman who rides the beast of Revelation (the real Da Vinci Code). [3]--Jorfer 15:07, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

I didn't say that I trust the Catholic Church. I said that I trust academics (the vast majority of whom are not Catholic) who specialize in the area of Biblical history and analysis, as they are more well-informed and studied in the area than either of thus, and have no possible motivation to lie about this sort of thing. Nor does the Catholic Church have a reason to lie here, as doing so could only serve to discredit them, and the Church has no reason to make Revelations seem like a historical anomaly. Rather, the reason they is similar to the reason why the modern Catholic Church accepts evolution, and that the Earth is round: they recognize the vast amount of scientific evidence in support of the theories, and thus subordinate themselves to these theories in order to avoid making their religion look absurd. (Or at least, avoid absurdity as much as possible; it's kind of hard to avoid it all, what with the giant hat and all.) Unfortunately, some other Christian denominations have not followed their lead, and have come across as exceptionally absurd as a result. -Silence 02:57, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Jack Chick and Chick Publications are not particularly trustworthy authorities on most things in religion, and in particular on the Catholic Church, for which Chick has a well-known and longtime hostility. I would not trust an amateur cartoonist to give me my theology or my history or anything else. It would be similar to accepting anything that the Westboro Baptist Church claims as authoritative.--Filll 15:29, 2 February 2007 (UTC)

Fair enough, see Whore of Babylon and [4]

Naturalism and public education

Their are only two kinds of explanations for how life was first created: the naturalistic model and the intelligent design model. These are very general models, however, because intelligent design can include the Raeliens and any other idea with a designer, but the failure of one does indicate the other in this more general description because if life did not originate from natural mechanisms then it arose from an intelligence (whatever it may be). Intelligent Design is the best explanation of the origin of life and should be allowed to be incorporated into the current evolution curriculum as such if the school system is not trying to brainwash the children of America.--Jorfer 04:19, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

• The idea that the only two kinds of explanations for life are evolution and creationism is one of the most pervasive and fundamentally mistaken notions in the entire creation-evolution controversy. This profound error is the source of many of the attempted arguments for creationism: it is assumed that if evolution is wrong, creationism must be right, so any holes that are poked in evolutionary theory will add weight to creationist claims. This is clearly mistaken. Even your more generalized claim that "the naturalistic model and the intelligent design model" are the only kinds of explanation for how life originated is simply false. You would have been accurate if you'd said that "the naturalistic model and the supernaturalistic model" are the only two kinds of explanations available, but intelligent design is not the only supernatural explanation for life's origin, so clearly "naturalism or supernaturalism" cannot be rephrased as "naturalism or intelligent design" without making a profound error. Indeed, the wealth of supernaturalistic origin beliefs is arguably even greater than the wealth of naturalistic ones, in part because they tend more often to be derived from human imagination (like intelligent design, for example—which is specifically derived from theology) than from empirical observation.
• Moreover, the fact that naturalistic and supernaturalistic explanations are the two "kinds" of explanations in no way implies that they are on equal footing. Remember that it is arbitrary to divide explanations based on those specific qualities; you could just as easily have said that the only two kinds of explanations for life are "evolutionary models" and "non-evolutionary models", or "models that don't involve magical unicorns" and "models that do involve magical unicorns", and you'd have been correct, but that wouldn't imply that the two are on equal scientific footing. Moreover, clearly there are countless different naturalistic models, of which evolution is only one (or at least a small group). For example, the idea that future humans traveled back in time to create the first life is a naturalistic explanation for life. And the idea that an unintelligent designer, or a group of designers, or just a random and completely arbitrary supernatural "chance occurrence", created life, is at least as plausible as the idea that an intelligent designer created life. Because it lacks evidence, intelligent design is on equal footing with every other supernaturalistic explanation, of which there are legion. In contrast, although evolution has a comparably diverse set of competing naturalistic explanations, evolution is the only one of much note because it's the only one that has all the evidence on its side. So, although it is fair to single out evolution from the pack among naturalistic explanations for life's diversity, it is clearly unfair to single out intelligent design from the pack among supernaturalistic ones; there is no reliable criterion for falsifying many of the supernatural explanations, including ID, so favoring one over the others is simply arbitrary, and the result more of your literalistic Christian belief system than of the current state of available evidence or research.
• You are also correct in noting, of course, that ID can include many different specific subtypes of supernatural beliefs, but that doesn't imply that ID is the only type of supernatural belief. That's as silly as saying that evolution is the only type of naturalistic explanation, just because there are different views on evolution (e.g., Lamarckism, orthogenesis, Darwinism, saltationism, gradualism, etc.). The fact that a plurality of views exists under ID or evolution does not imply that ID or evolution are the only two explanations in their respective domains (supernaturalism and naturalism). It is a blatant fallacy to state that if life did not arise by natural means, it must have arisen from an intelligence; in fact, this is one of the most famous of all fallacies, the false dilemma, and one of the best examples of false dilemmas in history.
• "Intelligent Design is the best explanation of the origin of life" - Intelligent Design is one of the worst explanations for the origin of life. It says nothing about the processes or mechanisms actually involved in the origin of life, nothing about the nature of the designer, and nothing about the way life or chemistry works. It makes no testable predictions, is not falsifiable, and has no practical value or productivity in helping us understand phenomena. It is vague, equivocal, and lacks any supporting evidence. It is dramatically outcompeted by its alternative explanations (particularly evolution), which, though they do not yet explain everything, are at least useful for explaining many things, unlike intelligent design, which has yet to explain anything about the world whatsoever. It is based on Christian theology and religious beliefs, and specifically, according to its leading proponents, on the Bible's Gospel of John, not on observation or experimentation. It is unscientific and non-empirical, and is promoted by the neo-creationist organizations such as the Discovery Institute for the express purpose of seeking to "reverse the stifling materialist world view and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions"[5] and "open the path for people to come to Christ", not for the purpose of explaining anything about the natural world, which is the function of real science. Consequently, Intelligent Design belongs in churches, not biologly classrooms in public schools. To do otherwise is a violation of the United States Constitution, an infringement on the fundamental freedoms of American citizens, and an insult to religion and science alike.
• "if the school system is not trying to brainwash the children of America" - You just advocated using the school system to try to brainwash the children of America: you want us to use science classrooms to preach the faith of the Christian Bible, or at least as much of that faith as possible (if a toned-down version of the Christian God is the only thing you can fit in, then that will have to do). You seem like a reasonable person overall, so how can you condone such blatant hypocrisy? Teaching children about evolution in no way precludes belief in God or in the Bible, so it in no way infringes upon their religious beliefs; the commonality of theistic evolution clearly attests to this. Indeed, the overwhelming majority of people in the world who accept the occurrence of evolution believe in the supernatural or in God. Evolution no more precludes God than gravity does; just because neither theory appeals to the existence of God, does not imply that they rule out belief in God. Gravity and evolution are explanations for how things work; they answer the question of "how", not the question of "why". There is nothing stopping you from believing in a God-guided evolution anymore than there is anything stopping you from believing in a God-guided gravity. If you personally choose to be offended by evolution for the hell of it, then you are free to reject it; but trying to push your personal religious views on the entire populace of U.S. citizens is just plain immoral. If ID is to be taught in any classrooms, the correct place to teach it is in religious studies classrooms, not in biology classrooms; it is not only immoral and unconstitutional to try to shove ID down the throats of children in biology classes, but it is equally immoral and unconstitutional to teach ID alone, without presenting any of the millions of other supernatural and religious beliefs out there. It would be like teaching the "first mover" cosmological argument for God in physics class, and refusing to discuss any non-Christian beliefs; teaching the teleological argument (which is what intelligent design amounts to) in biology class is equally unacceptable. No matter how compelling you find a certain theological argument, that does not justify teaching it as though it were science; at best, it's philosophy. -Silence 06:11, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I do not claim that the view of believers in abiogenesis naturalism represents all evolutionists, but you would sure get that idea from reading a public school textbook as there is not even the mention of the idea of God-guided evolution there. It is a popular enough idea in the scientific community to be at least worth mentioning in the public school curriculum. The mandatory and inflexible naturalistic approach to public education is an unfair abuse of the judicial system and is doing a great injustice to America's young people. Naturalists might complain about creationists using political power, but naturalists have the real power with liberal justices on their side. Liberals are using science to take God out of the classroom, not just creationism. I know most scientists do not want the courts to decide this issue because that is not how science works and it could easily backfire, but that is what they are letting happen.--Jorfer 04:19, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

• I fail to see what you mean. Almost all people in the world accept abiogenesis. Including every Christian. The disagreement is not over whether abiogenesis occurs, but over how it occurred. Christians believe that abiogenesis occurred through divine intervention; atheists believe that it did not occur through divine intervention. Scientists do not speculate about the supernatural or metaphysical, because there is no evidence to conclude anything about such claims, so scientists simply provide natural explanations for phenomena—in this case, abiogenetic scientific hypotheses are proposed explanations for the existence of life. There are a variety of scientific hypotheses of abiogenesis, and there is an even greater variety (by several orders of magnitude) of abiogenetic religious beliefs, including the Creation account in Genesis. Abiogenesis simply means "life generated from non-life"; the method of this generation is not specified in the word itself, and can apply to natural or supernatural causes just as easily. The only people who don't believe in abiogenesis are people who believe that life has always existed—for example, some Hindus who believe that life and the universe have been around forever would dispute abiogenesis. Christians, however, have no theological justification whatsoever for disputing it. At most, they might dispute the specifics of how abiogenesis occurred.
• "but you would sure get that idea from reading a public school textbook as there is not even the mention of the idea of God-guided evolution there" - ... Because public schools are forbidden to preach or indoctrinate students into any religious beliefs by the U.S. Constitution. Doi? How would you feel if public school textbooks taught children the idea of Satan-guided evolution, or Flying Spaghetti Monster-guided evolution, or Galatic Overlord Xenu-guided evolution? Whether or not you believe in God-guided evolution is purely a matter of personal beliefs, and should not have anything to do with biology textbooks, anymore than biology textbooks should preach anything about the human soul. By not advocating any religious views, we protect individual religious freedoms to pursue any religious belief (or lack thereof) which they desire. You are, ironically and hypocritically, advocating that we protect your religious freedom, at the expense of everyone else's religious freedom! Only people who agree with your specific belief in God will have their freedoms protected, and everyone else's beliefs will be denigrated. This would clearly not be a good situation, yet it's the one most creationists earnestly desire. Honestly, it's a bit frightening—not because I'm opposed to religion, but because infringing on people's right to not be proselytized at in a public school classroom is the first step to oppressing non-Christians in general. Once we decide that it's OK to preach our Christian (or at least monotheistic) religious beliefs in biology classrooms, we have officially stated that the only important, or acceptable, or truly American religious beliefs are our own—everyone else is automatically a second-class citizen for not sharing our religion. The absence of any mentioning of God in biology textbooks is a good thing, not only from a scientific perspective (because God is not scientific, and appealing to God has no more explanatory value in biological evolution than it has in stellar or chemical evolution), but also because it protects people's religious freedoms by not advocating any of them in a taxpayer-funded, mandatory, government-approved educational context.
• "It is a popular enough idea in the scientific community" - No, it isn't. No scientific publication has ever provided any evidence or support for the idea of God-guided evolution (or, obviously, for creationism/ID). It's a popular religious belief; it has nothing to do with science, and if it is held by a large number of scientists that has nothing to do with their status as scientists, but rather with their status as Christians. If a large number of scientists have beards, does that imply that having a beard is scientific, or that we should teach public school students in biology classrooms to grow beards? Clearly not. Only if beard growth is advocated in scientific journals does it become scientific; in the same way, only if God changes from being a personal religious belief that some scientists happen to hold, to being a genuine professional field of study in science, will this arbitrary fact become significant or relevant.
• "Liberals are using science to take God out of the classroom" - God has never been in the biology classroom. Biology studies life. God is not alive. Ergo, biology does not study God. Is that really so difficult to understand? For the same reason, chemistry doesn't study God either, and never has. Neither does clarinet class. Neither does economics class. Neither does ballroom dancing class. Neither does programming class. Is it an affront to your religious beliefs if we don't preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ in every Spanish class in the country? If not, then you have no basis for being offended by the absence of preaching or proselytizing of your specific religious views in biology classrooms. Biology is naturalistic for the exact same reason that Spanish class, programming class, ballroom dancing class, economics class, clarinet class, and chemistry class are: because they are explicitly and by definition classes which teach about natural phenomena and natural bodies of knowledge, not supernatural ones. The correct place for discussions of the supernatural are in philosophy and religion classes, and, indeed, intelligent design and theology are taught in thousands upon thousands of such classrooms across the nation. So where's the problem? Answer: there is no problem. The idea that biology, the scientific study of life, currently studies, or has ever studied, articles of Christian faith like the belief in a divine Creator, is a complete fiction, fabricated to try to infringe upon the religious freedoms of American citizens in order to proselytize the majority's religious beliefs to everyone in a clearly inappropriate context. Indeed, it would be equally inappropriate and unacceptable if such proselytizing went on in Spanish class or ballroom dancing class or economics class; there is absolutely nothing special about biology class in that respect.
• Biology classrooms do not "preach" naturalism; your error here is mistaking methodological naturalism, which is simply the basic strategy of focusing on explaining natural phenomena with natural explanations (which is relied on just as much in chemistry, physics, computer science, economics, and all foreign language classes as it is in biology), with philosophical naturalism, which is the belief that only the natural world exists. Science is methodologically naturalistic (which simply means that, by definition, it concerns itself with natural phenomena; concerning oneself with natural phenomena obviously in no way implies that supernatural phenomena don't exist! indeed, it says nothing whatsoever about the supernatural), but not philosophically naturalistic. Your concerns are thus entirely misplaced. You are imagining a liberal, atheistic, materialistic, child-brainwashing boogeyman where none actually exists. Sure, biology classes don't preach the Gospels; but they also never say that God doesn't exist. They simply don't address the issue of God at all. And why? Because it's a biology class! And biology only studies life. Is that clear? -Silence 06:11, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

It should be noted that the theory of evolution does not include abiogenesis. It is a common creationist fallacy to lump the Big Bang and abiogenesis and several other things in with the theory of biological evolution. It is also patently untrue that intelligent design and evolution are the only two choices explaining the diversity of species and their forms that we observe. Intelligent design, as presented by the Discovery Institute is just the latest incarnation of the ancient teleological argument, and it has so far failed all the tests that have been suggested. It has NO evidence supporting it. To want to teach the Christian gospel in secular publicly funded science classes is distinctly unAmerican. This sort of behavior is precisely what drove many of the founders of America out of Europe; religious intolerance. Quakers, Puritans, Unitarians, Anabaptists (including Mennonites, Amish, Dunkers, Hutterites, etc), Hugenots, Jews, etc. These groups and many others formed a country that was religiously pluralistic on purpose, because they saw the terrible trouble that religious restrictions caused. And you want to introduce religious coercion in PUBLICLY funded schools? So Muslims will have to pay taxes to pay for Christian indoctrination of their children in secular schools? Hindus? Buddhists? This is decidedly unAmerican, and antithetical to the principles on which America was founded.

I do not claim that the view of believers in abiogenesis represents all evolutionists, but you would sure get that idea from reading a public school textbook as there is not even the mention of the idea of God-guided evolution there.

In science books there is not, because this is against the principles established in the Constitution of the US, and therefore illegal.

It is a popular enough idea in the scientific community to be at least worth mentioning in the public school curriculum.

Most scientists probably eat breakfast and have a shower in the morning instead of in the evening, but this is not mentioned in the public school curricula either. It is irrelevant.

The mandatory and inflexible naturalistic approach to public education is an unfair abuse of the judicial system and is doing a great injustice to America's young people.

Where is the abuse of the judicial system? What did science do to abuse the judicial system? What is the injustice to America's young people? To teach them only science in science classes? Should all churches by law be required to allow scientists to come to the Sunday School classes to tell them that the notion of God is a joke and that the bible is an ancient bunch of stories and lies? How fair would that be? Remember churches are favored tremendously with tax benefits, so they are being subsidized with the public purse.

Naturalists might complain about creationists using political power, but naturalists have the real power with liberal justices on their side.

Liberal justices like the staunch republican appointed by Bush who ruled in the Dover case? The legal system is a counterweight to the other branches of government, and it is to avoid wild swings in policy, like setting up a theocracy for example. You do not believe in the constitution?

Liberals are using science to take God out of the classroom, not just creationism.

You can have God in church classrooms. You can have God in private school classrooms. You can have God in your homeschooling. You can have God in your religion classrooms in public schools. You can have God in current event classrooms and social study classrooms and philosophy classrooms and history classrooms and all sorts of other classrooms in public schools. Just not science classrooms in publicly-funded secular schools. That is all. And in fact, it is even more generous to religious types: the judicial rulings are only that it cannot be required by schoolboards or states that creationism be taught in science classrooms. If a teacher includes it in the curriculum, and the school does not object, then there is no problem. However, the schoolboard cannot REQUIRE the teachers to teach it. So that seems MORE than fair. All that creationists cannot have is the right to throw teachers in prison and to fine them for not teaching creationism. That is a bit over the top. Why do you want to throw teachers who disagree with teaching creationism as science in prison? This is completely against the Constitution, and it is unfair to those of other faiths or no faith, and it disagrees completely with the science. You might as well say that plumbers who do not include God in their practice of plumbing are discriminating against God and states should have the right to put such plumbers in prison (remember that the consequences of bad plumbing were thought to be judgements from God not too long ago).

I know most scientists do not want the courts to decide this issue because that is not how science works and it could easily backfire, but that is what they are letting happen.

Scientists do not want to waste more time in the courts, but they will if they have to, to preserve science as independent of some radical religious minority. Creationists have lost every major court battle in the last 25 years. Over and over and over. As the judge said about intelligent design in the Dover case, ID is "breathtaking inanity" --Filll 16:40, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

• Fine cite a source that says that teachers can choose to teach intelligent design if they wish. I think anyone who says this does not have an understanding of how beauracratized the school sytem; teachers have little power in it. Most classrooms are taught from the textbook and thus it not being included in the textbook makes it not much of a choice even if it is one. I would be against mandating it like evolution is, but the issue of the textbook still remains. Many science teachers probablly believe in God-guided evolution and many would probably teach intelligent design, if they could. I mispoke; I should have said it should be allowed to be incorporated. I deserve the rebuttal.--Jorfer 17:05, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Your claim that many science teachers "would probably teach intelligent design, if they could" is clearly false. Probably much less than 1% of all biology teachers in the United States would voluntarily teach intelligent design. In the places where schools have been forced to teach ID for a time (until the courts overthrew these attacks on religious freedoms), it's almost without exception been the biology teachers who have been the strongest opponents of the measure, and who have often been threatened, maligned, fired, and made into outcasts for daring to want to teach science, rather than religion, in a science classroom. As soon as biology classrooms start teaching God, everyone who doesn't believe in your specific conception of God (as a transcendent, mystical supernatural intelligence who directly and miraculously created and guided life and the universe for a specific purpose and design) becomes a second-class citizen and a social outcast. That is precisely the sort of environment that is least conducive to education, tolerance, and a functional society. -Silence 19:52, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Take a look at Edwards v. Aguillard and many of the other court cases listed at level of support for evolution if you want to see the actual court rulings. It is ok if teachers want to teach it, but the way the US works, you can be fired for anything or even no reason at all. This is one of the main central principles of employment in the US. It is called "at will employment". Most teachers have some sort of contract, but it is a far weaker right to a job than in most other countries. If you want to attack this principle, you are unAmerican. Also, if any parents complain, then the teacher will have to deal with the consequences. Because another important principle in the US is that there is local control over schools. And parents have the right to sue, again because this is the US. If you want to get rid of several major parts of US culture, then teachers can unilaterally decide to force students to learn it with no consequences. To suggest otherwise is unAmerican. And some might say, even unpatriotic. --Filll 18:04, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Parents being financially forced to enroll their kids in a certain school is also unamerican.--Jorfer 18:16, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

• You say that intelligent design does not belong in the biology classroom, but I would ask if you saw a clock (I know it is inanimate but the same idea applies.) and had no idea of who made it, would you give a naturalistic reason for its creation in the public schools? If it was a living thing, its creation would belong in the biology classroom as it has to do with life.--Jorfer 17:13, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

The only thing that belongs in the science classroom is science. Intelligent design is not science. If and when it becomes science, then it can be taught.--Filll 18:04, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

You did not answer the question. This is a yes or no question.--Jorfer 18:16, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

I suspect there is something you are not understanding. Science includes only naturalistic explanations. Anything else is not science, and should not be taught as science. So I would only advocate a naturalistic explanation for anything in a science class. And over 99.9% of all professional biologists agree with me. Is that clearer?--Filll 18:24, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

If I saw a clock and had no idea who made it, of course I would assume a naturalistic creation. If you were walking down the beach and happened to see a clock, would you immediately jump to the conclusion that it was made by magic, or would you try to learn about its actual origin? Clocks are obviously not a correct analogy for life, but your example does illustrate how absurd it is to leap to the supernatural as an explanation for something that has a much simpler and more useful natural explanation: in the case of a clock, that humans built it; in the case of life, that natural processes and mechanisms originated and developed it. This is because in the former case, the simplest explanation is the naturalistic one that a human made it, because all the evidence indicates artificial creation; and in the latter case, the simplest explanation is the naturalistic one that a complex chemical reactions made it, because all the evidence indicates natural creation. In the former case, we know that humans exist, and thus it is safe to say that humans created clocks; however, in the latter case, we can't be similarly sure that God exists (because there is no reliable evidence that this is so), much less what sort of being God would be, nor can we think of any meaningful and coherent reason why God would create life (since humans, unlike God, have needs which creations like clocks can help fulfil; God, if he was perfect, would have no such needs, have nothing at all lacking, and thus no need or desire to create), so leaping to an imaginary, hypothetical mythological creator without considering naturalistic explanations would be foolhardy indeed.

Whenever you see a natural phenomena, you immediately assume a natural cause: when you see lightning, you do not believe that gods caused it; when you see a sunrise, you do not believe that gods caused it; when you see aspirin take away your headache, you do not believe that gods caused it. This very natural, normal, and useful way of looking at the world is the only thing science "assumes" when analyzing phenomena. Without that assumption, we would believe that lightning, sunsets, and medicine are directly caused by gods, and thus would fail to dig deeper and try to actually learn about those things. The anthropomorphic assumption of religion might be comforting indeed in one's private and social life, but in science it is simply untenable: there is no sound basis for inferring supernatural, intelligent design behind any natural phenomenon, least of all life, which is much better understood than many other aspects of the world. -Silence 19:52, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Filll made the point below that it is unconstitutional (and "Unamerican") to teach belief in God in a public school biology classroom. You'll need to homeschool or private-school your child if you want them to have a purely religious education. Hoewever, it is important to remember that the same applies if you want your child to have an anti-religious or atheistic education: American public schools provide neither endorsements of God or religion, nor denials or condemnations of them. They simply do not address the topic. That is because the purpose of public schools is to educate, not to indoctrinate people into any specific religious belief system—or any specific political belief system, for that matter.

God is simply outside the scope of biology, by definition; whether God exists or not in reality is immaterial, because as long as God is religious (and last time I checked, he was!), implicitly or explicitly advocating belief in God in a public school science classroom is a violation of the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution. The opposite of a religious education is not a secular education; the opposite of a religious education is an anti-religious education. Public schools should be neither religious nor anti-religious, hence their secularity, putting them square in the middle of the two extremes. -Silence 19:30, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

To put it another way: would you, Jorfer, be offended if a public school teacher was teaching your children that God is a lie and Satan is the true creator of the universe, or that reincarnation, rather than the afterlife, is true, or that the human soul is a Thetan placed in your body by an evil galactic overlord named Xenu who stacked them up around volcanoes, brainwashed them, and blew them up with hydrogen bombs? How would you feel if your child came home from school one day, having been converted by his biology teacher into a Satanist, a Hindu, or a Scientologist? If you would be upset, then you would be right to be upset: public schools, and particularly biology classrooms in public schools, should not advocate religious beliefs of any sort. Once it's OK for Christian beliefs like intelligent design to be preached in biology, it will be equally OK for Satanist, Hindu, and Scientologist ones to be preached as well—and, if the openness is to be truly fair, it will also be OK to preach in biology class that all religions are false. If you find any of these scenarios at all objectionable, then it is hypocrisy for you to persist in advocating that Christian views be taught in public school science classrooms.

Moreover, I fail to see how any of these scenarios would improve children's science education in any way whatsoever; even if one of those religious beliefs happens to be true, there's no way of telling the true ones apart from the false ones, and because they're all supernaturalistic they must ultimately be taken up on faith, not based on solid evidence. Teaching intelligent design as though it were science, rather than theology, is an affront to all Americans' religious freedoms, constitutional rights, and human rights, and can inevitably lead only to a greatly degraded and diluted science education, a profound religious hypocrisy and unfairness, and a terrible state of affairs where public schools turn into battlegrounds between competing religious doctrines, rather than safe havens for education. -Silence 20:08, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

• First, The public schools system is supposed to be a comprehensive basic education so leaving out God is tantamount to say that He does not exist, or even if He does exist, it is incosequential. It has been said that the opposite of love is not anger but apathy, and though it may be hyperbola, it speaks volumes on the attitude of "not being worth my time". Also, since we teach what exists instead of what does not exist, by leaving out the mention of God, we imply He does not exist. If the public schools taugh what does not exist, for example, then leaving out the mention of God implies that he does exist; this is just the nature of the system. So I would disagree that leaving out the issue of God in public schools is as "secular" as you would claim it is.
• Second, if nothing else, learning the theory of intelligent design would improve the current state of society. Though I do not advocate ad-hoc research or "the end justifies the means" of the Discovery institute, society would be a better place if people believed that even if the government is not watching, the Creator is.
• Third, I would expect lighting, the sunset, and medicine to be attributed to an incorrect cause until research comes out that gives a better explanation. The nature of science is that it contains preliminary assessments and then continually revises them. Just because new information is likely to come out does not mean that we should not give students a good idea of where the weight of evidence currently sits, especially on something as important to Biology as the point of abiogenesis.
• Fourth, I would disagree that there is no reliable evidence that there is a God. The accelerating expansion of the universe, the larger occurance of instances of infinity then "something coming from nothing" in the universe (which indicate that something is more likely to have always existed then come from nothing), structure and organization in the universe, and the second law of thermodynamics (you knew I was not going to leave this one out) are just a couple.

--Jorfer 06:27, 4 February 2007 (UTC)

• "First, The public schools system is supposed to be a comprehensive basic education so leaving out God is tantamount to say that He does not exist, or even if He does exist, it is incosequential." - And a Hindu would say, "leaving out reincarnation is tantamount to saying it does not occur". And a Scientologist would say, "leaving out Thetans is tantamount to saying they do not exist". And a conspiracy theorist would say, "leaving out extraterrestrial abductions is tantamount to saying they do not exist". How are we supposed to sort through all these claims, along with the theistic ones, when they are all equally unsupported by the evidence? If we have to include one religious or philosophical position in public education, we have to include them all, or we are showing arbitrary favoritism to a specific religious tradition (in this case, the Christian one, or at the very least the monotheistic one).
• The real reason God isn't taught in public schools isn't because he doesn't exist—it's because we don't know whether he exists, so it would be inappropriate to try to subtly coerce children into following our specific beliefs, against the wills of the tax-paying citizens who are their parents. Because God is not addressed in public school (either to endorse or oppose belief in him, either of which would be justifiable without the Establishment Clause), individuals are free to pursue whatever religion they want without any sense whatsoever of being in any way persecuted or outcast by their secular (cf. separation of church and state), non-theocratic government's taxpayer-funded public schools. Religious beliefs are not left out of public school because they aren't important, nor even because they aren't true; they're left out because a pluralistic society must refrain from endorsing any unproven religious belief, lest religious intolerance, infighting, and violence ensue. The results of government-endorsed religion are clear both in historical theocracies and in modern-day ones, and the American forefathers were wise and circumspect enough to recognize this trend and take the steps necessary to counteract it, establishing a secular government where people of all religions are free to personally believe—or not believe—what they wish.
• In a sense, God is already taught in all public schools: he is taught in social studies and history classes, when world religions are discussed. The reason he is not taught in biology class is because there is no scientific evidence or support for God being the creator of all life; the reason he is not taught in physics class is because there is no scientific evidence or support for God being the creator of the laws of nature; the reason he is not taught in Spanish class is because there is no scientific evidence or support for God being the creator of the Spanish language. All of these are possible, but none of these have any scientific support, none has ever been substantiated by any evidence, and none has ever been found acceptable by peer-reviewed scientific, or even sociological, publications in the fields of biology, or physics, or linguistics.
• The reason we draw a distinction at all between people's personal religious beliefs and the scientific facts and theories is because there is such broad professional support for numerous aspects of the latter, whereas there is none for the former; because there is no evidence for the former, whereas there is much for the latter; and because it is ignorant and intolerant of other cultural and philosophical beliefs to assume that one's own views must be the correct one, when there is no demonstrable proof that this is so. History has already taught us the consequences of being intolerant of alternate religious views; whereas scientific views can be verified or falsified by the evidence, many religious beliefs cannot, meaning that when people of different religious beliefs interact, they must find a way to reconcile their differences, be it through peace and tolerance or violence and intolerance. Governments should encourage the former and discourage the latter, for everyone's sake. And the best way to do this is to promote a society where people are free to privately believe in any religion, but discouraged from indoctrinating everyone else into their own religion through public schools.
• Religion is ultimately based, you see, upon faith and personal conviction; science, in contrast, is ultimately based on empirical evidence. Because we all live in the same world and more or less share the same experiences, it is possible for us to confirm or falsify scientific claims beyond any reasonable doubt, by checking the evidence in question. Faith, however, cannot be tested; it cannot be falsified; it is ultimately entirely personal and subjective. This doesn't necessarily make it bad: faith serves many people very well, bringing them comfort, happiness, a sense of peace or spiritual bliss, etc. However, this subjective characteristic of faith makes it inappropriate to try to force one's faith upon others. They must choose whether or not to follow your religion of their own free will; they must even choose whether or not to seek your faith (which is why it is not acceptable to, for example, fill biology class with Christian or Scientologist doctrines even if we always qualify them with things like "Scientologists/Christians claim..." or "You don't have to believe this, but..." or anything of the sort). It is quite possible that one religion is true, and the rest are all false; but trying to coerce everyone to follow the religion you happen to believe in (or even a specific religious belief you happen to hold, like belief in a supreme, supernatural Creator God) is unacceptably intolerant, and it is simply dishonest to mischaracterize such coercion, no matter how it is rephrased (cf. Wedge strategy), as trying to defend anyone's rights or freedoms.
• "So I would disagree that leaving out the issue of God in public schools is as "secular" as you would claim it is." - You seem to have misspoken; that's the definition of "secular". Did you mean to say that it doesn't "leave room" for monotheism as much as I claim it does? If so, you're criticizing secularity, not disputing whether God is secular (which is a pretty absurd thing to dispute; what's next, are we going to dispute whether the Eucharist is religious?).

Comment: I do not think it is fair to quote me out of context (you may well be beating down a straw man). Here is the full quote:

"...since we teach what exists instead of what does not exist, by leaving out the mention of God, we imply He does not exist. If the public schools taugh what does not exist, for example, then leaving out the mention of God implies that he does exist; this is just the nature of the system. So I would disagree that leaving out the issue of God in public schools is as "secular" as you would claim it is."--Jorfer 04:05, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

• "society would be a better place if people believed that even if the government is not watching, the Creator is." - I will address this important point in the below section #Intelligent Design will make people moral.
• "Third, I would expect lighting, the sunset, and medicine to be attributed to an incorrect cause until research comes out that gives a better explanation. The nature of science is that it contains preliminary assessments and then continually revises them. Just because new information is likely to come out does not mean that we should not give students a good idea of where the weight of evidence currently sits, especially on something as important to Biology as the point of abiogenesis." - I agree 100% with everything stated here. That is exactly why we should not deceive students by misrepresenting the level of scientific support for abiogenesis by natural chemical processes, or by lying to them about the profound lack of support for the pseudoscientific religious belief called intelligent design. It's certainly possible that at some point in the future ID will turn out to be correct; but until it is, it is unacceptable for us to lie to students about "where the weight of evidence currently sits".
• "Fourth, I would disagree that there is no reliable evidence that there is a God." - I'll address this important point in another new section below, #Evidence for God. -Silence 02:59, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

If all people in the US or in a given region had the same religion, and believed the same religious beliefs, and agreed on all aspects, then there many fewer potential problems with including religion in all public schools. However, there would still be problems, because supernatural reasoning gets in the way of scientific reasoning. Here is a way to think of it. A teacher gives you an assignment in physics. It will take 20 steps to get to the answer, which is in the back of the book. John can get the first 3 steps, but then is stumped. Tom can get all 20 steps. John writes on his homework "a miracle happens to get me from step 3 to step 20". Should John get the same grade as Tom? Should John get a better grade because he shows more respect for God? Would Tom and John even bother to try to solve the problems since they could always just claim a miracle gave them the right answer?--Filll 03:43, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

The kid would who gave 3 steps did not give the best answer to the question. The kid who gave the 20 steps has the best answer and should be awarded a better grade. Intelligent Design, on the other hand, may well be the best explanation for abiogenesis.--Jorfer 03:59, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I am glad you admit that the child who was able to give all 20 steps should get a better grade. Because the child who only did 3 steps is the same sort of thing that intelligent design is: when you cannot get the answer, you just give up, and claim it was a miracle. Just like the child who did only 3 steps. Now this does not mean that intelligent design might not be the best answer. However, so far it has not been. And in several hundred years of scientific effort on this problem, intelligent design has not solved any scientific problems that naturalistic science could. Intelligent design has just cheated, like the child who only could do 3 of the steps.--Filll 04:19, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Theories for life's origin besides ID and "evolution" (sic)

• The first idea you gave for a theory outside of evolution and intelligent design is illogical. How could people go back in time to create humans if they never existed in the first place? You do have a point on the second one; Life could be an accidental creation by God, however unlikely.--Jorfer 17:22, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

You want to define logic your own way. That is not how this works, however. There might easily be a loophole in physics that allows people to go back in time to do this. There are many ways that life could be produced:

• the result of mating of gods, as in some Vedic scriptures
• there are an infinite number of universes, and only in some do the laws come together in the right way to create life, and we live in one of those universes
• life and the universe do not exist-your entire existence is a hallucination or dream of some other being
• life is the result of a science experiment by some other being
• you are imagining all of this universe and life
• we know from quantum mechanics that matter can appear from nothing and disappear. And life is intimately related to reality because of the quantum role of the observer, so maybe life is just a quantum fluctuation and linked inextricably with reality in a way we cannot understand
• Man is the result of a contest between many gods
• life and man were created as entertainment for gods
• you yourself are god, who is just dreaming all this, and do not realize that you are god
• rocks are really alive, and life is just a mutation of rocks reproducing
• take your pick of origin stories in Creation within belief systems
• life is an infection the body of some cosmic giant that we inhabit.
• there is an undiscovered law of physics that makes life much more likely to be spontaneously created than we think.
• The earth or the universe is alive
• plants are actually the most intelligent creatures on earth and we are their creations
• Life started in multiple places on earth by accident
• Lamarckian principles are far more important in designing life than we currently believe
• we are the result of a computer simulation, Matrix-style

I am sure if you use your imagination, you can think of many many others. The possibilities are endless.--Filll 18:04, 3 February 2007 (UTC)

Intelligent Design will make people moral

Jorfer said, "society would be a better place if people believed that even if the government is not watching, the Creator is". This is incorrect on a number of counts.

First, this presumes that the Creator cares about, or is "watching", us; this need not be true even if life is intelligently designed. In fact, we can't even be sure that the Creator still exists, just because he existed at some point; perhaps the Creator destroyed himself (which would explain why we haven't seen any dramatic miracles akin to the creation of life of late).

Second, this presumes that the Creator is good, or ethical, in any meaningful sense; it is equally possible that God is evil, in which case God would want us to do immoral things. Life being intelligently designed does not make the intelligent designer good; indeed, the existence of suffering and other seemingly unnecessarily harmful aspects of the world strongly implies the opposite.

Third, this presumes that people would know what the Creator wants, just because they knew they were Created; believing that life is intelligently designed tells us absolutely nothing about the purposes, values, views, or preferences of the intelligent designer, so it is perfectly possible for everyone in the world to believe in ID without anyone changing their ethical views whatsoever. Even nihilists can justify their belief system under the ID paradigm, by simply saying that the designer is opposed to assigning "values" or "meaning" to anything. In fact, there is a strong case to be made that if belief in ID were more widespread, it would increase, rather than decrease, the presence of immorality. First, dozens of studies have found correlations between religiosity and immoral behavior; it has been found that the more zealously religious or theistic one is, the more likely one is to be culturally intolerant, dishonest, hypocritical, dogmatic, etc. This, of course, doesn't mean that all, or even most, religious people are bad people; on the contrary, I think the vast majority of religious people are honest, kind, well-meaning individuals. But it does completely disprove the idea that being religious, in itself, can make one more moral; ethics cares little for metaphysics.

The second reason why the spread of ID would be more likely to increase than decrease immorality is because, as mentioned above, ID does not necessitate any specific ethical stance, which means that anyone could justify any ethical beliefs whatsoever by appealing to what that specific person thinks that the Designer wants. Anyone could claim to be a prophet from the Designer, state his own personal views, and thus convince IDers to follow that person. Warring and competing ID cults would skyrocket in popularity, empirical science and medicine would shrivel up and die to be replaced by pseudoscientific frauds and fads and witch doctors, and religious wars between nations who believe different things about the intelligent designer would become commonplace. There is a strong case to be made, in fact, that if all governments in the world officially accepted the existence of an Intelligent Designer, abandoned secularity altogether, and became theocratic and faith-based, it could easily lead to the destruction of human civilization and the deaths of billions, as people sought to defeat everyone who believed in an intelligent designer with different attributes or teachings or values.

Fourth, this presumes that it is genuinely good to do moral acts for no reason other than because you believe you are being "watched" by God or the government. If the only reason someone doesn't rape and kill strangers is out of fear of being punished by God or government, is that person truly being moral? Isn't it better for us to encourage love, compassion, and empathy in the populace, rather than encouraging blind obedience to authorities, doing good only out of fear of punishment or desire for reward, and disregarding the needs of others in favor of one's own self-interest? -Silence 02:59, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

It might be true. However, how does one explain the results in the following:

Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look, Gregory S. Paul, Journal of Religion & Society, Volume 7 (2005) ISSN 1522-5658--Filll 03:37, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Evidence for God

• "Fourth, I would disagree that there is no reliable evidence that there is a God." - Over 99% of all scientists would disagree with you, as would every major scientific publication in the world, which, you will notice, unanimously lack any studies purporting to support the existence of God. Even many creationists concede that there is no evidence that God exists; if there was, that would make religious faith unnecessary.
• "The accelerating expansion of the universe," - How is this evidence for God? There is no attribute of God that necessitates that the universe expand increasingly quickly, and belief in God does not in any way help to account for this expansion. You seem to be committing the God of the gaps and argument from ignorance fallacies.
• "the larger occurance of instances of infinity then "something coming from nothing" in the universe (which indicate that something is more likely to have always existed then come from nothing)," - How is this evidence for God? This is evidence against God. Many theists believe that God created the universe "from nothing" (ex nihilo creation). In contrast, most scientific explanations for the origin of the universe do not believe that there was ever a time when nothing existed—the universe has always existed, in one form or another (even if that form was merely quantum fluctuations). This resolves the problem of something coming from nothing. In contrast, the existence of God cannot resolve this problem, because it begs the question; if everything needs to have come from something else, and something cannot come from nothing, then an infinite regress is inevitable, and God cannot in any way resolve this infinite regress, because God must also have come from something. If everything doesn't need to come from something else, then there is no reason to believe that God is the only possible exception to this rule, when the simpler explanation (cf. Ockham's Razor, parsimony) is that some aspect of the natural universe has existed forever. This paradox is therefore decidedly not evidence for God; if anything, it greatly weakens the case for God.
• "structure and organization in the universe,'" - Structure and organization do not imply intelligence. Snowflakes are structured and organized through purely natural processes, explainable without appealing to the supernatural or to an intelligent designer. If anything structured and organized can be explained in this way, then nothing structured and organized requires an intelligent designer to explain it, unless there's some special reason to believe that it was, indeed, intelligently designed (for example, if we actually observe an intelligent being creating such a thing).
• "and the second law of thermodynamics" - The second law of thermodynamics is not evidence for God. Nothing about God necessitates or explains this law.
• You're 0 for 5. None of the above things are evidence for God, or even for an intelligent designer of any sort. Got anything else? -Silence 02:59, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I believe that there is no proof for God, and not even very strong evidence. But if I were to contemplate this question (which I do from time to time) I would not use the standard arguments, which I think are basically bankrupt and have long been dismissed. Of course, by necessity I would advocate a "God of the Gaps" because from rational viewpoint, you have to look in a place that is most fertile for exploration. Worn out arguments about entropy are basically hopeless. For example, I would look more closely at:

• abiogenesis (not likely to be successful, but still interesting)
• nature of consciousness (maybe the result of a chemical reaction, but still highly mysterious)
• balance of physical constants (intriguing, but unfortunately possibly dismissed by anthropic argument)
• questions about the role of the observer (a deeply mysterious area in quantum mechanics that might be well beyond human understanding, at least at this time)
• work done on whether God had a choice when he created the universe (an area of theoretical physics investigation)
• experiments suggested and ongoing in physics looking for evidence of a creator (several actual serious experiments are ongoing, but interestingly, creationists ignore these completely: They are probably too complicated and technical for creationists because these actually require thought, instead of complaining about evolution)
• the nature of renormalization (a mystery that we do not understand in theoretical physics, that has existed for decades)
• the nature of the vacuum (quantum fluctuations can create something from nothing)
• unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics
• nature of gravity (deeply mysterious, and possibly responsible for the creation of time and space in our universe)

Unfortunately, for creationists, there are no creationist websites they can refer to for this sort of material. I might have to write something more about them at some point.--Filll 03:34, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I should have spelled out my view. The universe could not have always existed without a God because their would be no usable energy left because of the second law of thermodynamics. God existed forever (infinity is ever present in the universe) and is an infinite source of energy that has been discovered and named by scientists as Dark Energy (not dark as in evil but dark as in not visible). I left a comment on its talk page if you want to know more about my views on that. I also feel that so called Dark Matter is Heaven. The universe (per Big Bang theory I believe) shoud be slowing its expansion right now, but it is speeding up. Since we are made in God's image, the universe is expanding in a progressive fashion just like humans development on earth, because we are made in His image. Finally, the organization and structure of the universe is much more complex than a snowflake. The Hoover Dam is much more complex then a beaver dam which indicates that humans built the former and beavers built the latter.--Jorfer 04:28, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

Your views in this matter are starting to approach those of Maimonides who equated scientific laws with angels, or Einstein who saw something he called "God" in the mysteries of the universe. My own views are not so different. However, although I cannot quite follow your reasoning about the laws of thermodynamics, which are sort of flakey laws, to be honest, as far as laws go. Also, one should be aware that time did not exist before the Big Bang. Although it is not clear exactly what time is anyway, and its nature is clearly associated with entropy somehow and also with time.--Filll 04:34, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I was trying to say that the second law of thermodynamics indicates that if the universe did not have a beginning under traditional theory, then there would be no usable energy which means no movement (equilibrium) and thus no life or really much of anything. You say that time would not have existed before the big bang which means the energy of the universe would be frozen in time. This would explain it (if you could explain energy being frozen in time seemingly forever).--Jorfer 05:20, 5 February 2007 (UTC)

I have a good article on the big bang around here somewhere that you might like to read, if I can find it for you.--Filll 05:27, 5 February 2007 (UTC)