I can turn you atheist/agnostic

God invented Science.

I like the way Bunkered put it.

I believe that it wasn't long ago that scientists have found a way to create the precursors to life in a lab. They set the conditions to what is thought to be early earth, and applied some electricity to what they had in the container. It didn't create a new organism, but rather arranged some of the parts to be more suitable for the first life to happen.

It's not exactly spontaneous, but scientists are working out how primordial soup and early earth's weather could have created life. It wont be long until we have found many ways life could have happened on its own.

They're also on the way to creating life in labs that have nothing to do with the way early earth was.

The knowledge is coming, people trying to hold it back or hide it is what will keep people in doubt.

Susan Storm wrote: Ok, Kayback, you are right.  Science is forever backtracking and proving itself wrong. (Whole bunch of irrelivent garbage)

Ha ha. Veeery funny.

I will admit the word "All" was badly placed in my post, I should have used the word "many".

There is harly any field of study that you can mention that hasn't had a turn around or a drastic change in understanding that invalidates something the same field hadn't held up as fact earlier though.

Tolgak I'm not saying it is impossible. All I am saying is at the moment we don't know everything. And the more we look into things, the more we find we didn't know before we looked there. Is it so impossible to believe there might be some all powerful force making the rules and making sure they are in place?

And is it so hard to believe that this force is sentient?

There are plenty of things that are in the bible and have scientific theory or evidence to back it up.

Genisis ? Let there be light vs Big Bang. Whats the difference? No one knows what caused the universe to be. Some believe it just happened, other believe it was created. There is BELIEF on both sides of the fence.

God creating the animals and the human race vs Evolution. Whats the difference if the force that started evolution was God. No one can say what caused life to originate on this planet, and it happened suprisingly soon after the planet is thought to have been formed. Again, there is no evidence to support a creator inspired evolution or a random accident, both sides have to believe their point of view is right.

Personally I'm not the most religious person on the planet, but I prefer having the thought that there was some sort of thought put into my existence instead of the thought that if anything in the universe differed by even one percent, we wouldn't be here.

Unlike what Susan was trying to say, even if you don't understand the theory behind something does it mean it won't work.

Obviously our cars won't stop working, nor will the internet dissapear, or my gun not fire. But again these are all things that we THINK we have a handle on. Just like people thought they had a handle on things like atoms and protons and the like.

Now we know about Quarks and Gluons. I seriously doubt we will ever prove something as grossly macro as an internal combustion engine wrong, but more in depth and better understandings of the burn pattern, and the interaction of the molecules will deepen our knowledge, and possibly open new avenues of understanding which will change how the engines work for ultimate fuel efficiency. Obviously I have no idea what future science will reveal, so I can't give a real example of how something could be revealed that changes how we think an engine works. It could be something like anti gluons swapping from one particle's protons during a reaction which liberates the thermal energy. ( a pretty crap example I know, but the best out of the ordinary I could come up with)

People are still trying to figure out Ionic, Covalent and metallic bonds, not to mention Atomic forces. Similar to gravity they are forces that exist, and can be measured to a degree, but not duplicated.

Susan Science is a method of gathering information and knowledge. That's all. It is by far the most effective means of doing so we have ever conceived, and is responsible for the vast majority of knowledge we have, but it is still just a method. Religion/faith is a fundamentally non-rational decision-making process.    And that's fine - there is nothing wrong with the occasional non-rational decision-making. Where I have a beef is when people misinterpret or misunderstand science because of some perceived conflict with religious beliefs. If you non-rationally believe that god created Eve from Adam's rib, for instance, that's fine. What's not fine is when you, motivated by this belief, start incorrectly attacking biological science that you deem incompatible with your belief. If you want to attack biology, go nuts - biologists do it all the time. But do so honestly and well-informed. Scientists have spent hundreds or thousands of years developing the body of knowledge we have today. They deserve better than having people casually dismiss their findings out of ignorance because they don't like the results.

I couldn't agree with you more on most of these points.

Religion itself isn't to blame, it's the fanatical arms of religion that has the anti science stance. It's taking work that was "published" over 2000 years ago and they claim it's the "word of God". It isn't. Unless there is an original copy with God's fax number or E-mail address as the originator, it has to be a person's interpretation of what they think the "word of God" is. The problem comes in when fanatical religions hold these pubications as the end all and be all.

Like I said earlier, they were good survival handbooks. However the limiting factor comes when people claim they can't be added to, or taken away from. But those are only fundamentalist.

I disagree with the statement that "It pointedly ignores available evidence when reaching its conclusion." HOW is it ignoring available evidence when its reaching the conclusion, especially when things like science haven't reached the limit of evidence yet? Or reached all the conclusions.

I do agree that there are people who operate within the religion who's best interest is served by ignoring science, or even trying to refute it. However that it the person's fault, not the religion's.

KBK

Bah, I just saw Bunkered's post on the last page, and he said what I've been trying to say in 5 pages, in 5 lines.

/me shakes his fist.

KBK


Edited by Kayback - 11 December 2007 at 6:10pm

Kayback wrote: There is harly any field of study that you can mention that hasn't had a turn around or a drastic change in understanding that invalidates something the same field hadn't held up as fact earlier though.

You keep saying that, but your only example is a non-scientific belief from hundreds of years ago.  Please provide some more relevant recent specifics.

But allow me to drill down further. 

Science basically has two components:  Data and theory.  We collect data, formulate a potential theory to explain the data, and then collect some more data to test the potential theory.  When a potential theory survives a bunch of tests and matches a bunch of data, we promote it to "Theory".  It still gets tested all the time, but we now consider it reliable enough to proceed on.

Now, the data itself is hardly ever "proven wrong".  There are instances of fraud, of course, and there are frequently refinements in collection and measurement technology and technique, but the collected data itself basically lives forever.  Some data might be consider more or less reliable and weighted accordingly, but data is just data.

Then there are theories and potential theories.  Potential theories (sometimes called hypotheses) are proven wrong all the time.  That's the "potential" part.  Now, scientists love to brag about their discoveries to the press, and we are forever reading in the papers about some scientist that has "proven" something or other.  Most of the time, they are reporting what is actually a small piece of data supporting a potential theory - far from "proven".  "Proven" doesn't happen overnight, but is a cumulative effect.

By the time something is considered "proven" scientifically, it is based on a mountain of well-considered data and well-tested theories.  And when something reaches this level, it is very, very rarely shown to be flat out wrong.  Theories that reach this level are tweaked and modified to incorporate new data, but it is a very rare day when a well-established scientific theory is disproven.

Obviously not.

Except sporx swearing.

That is strikable for both of you.

I suggest you edit.

Not yet sporx, but it will if you keep posting f-bombs. So by all means, please continue.

So you like it when she types dirty eh?