Posted: Wed Apr 01, 2009 4:00 am
Which is the problem. They're NOT a threat, yet people like you see the red cape and charge madly.Skipjack wrote:Dont even get me started on the creationists...
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Which is the problem. They're NOT a threat, yet people like you see the red cape and charge madly.Skipjack wrote:Dont even get me started on the creationists...
Actually, they are cause they are putting their votes where their lack of brains are. Texas' state board of education split on a 50/50 vote on whether to mandate teaching creationism recently. This means not just that half of the board was on the creationist bandwagon, but the other half thought the topic actually merited discussion.djolds1 wrote:Which is the problem. They're NOT a threat, yet people like you see the red cape and charge madly.Skipjack wrote:Dont even get me started on the creationists...
Strong creationists remind me of some Protestants who insist that every word of the Bible is literally correct. Of course, for that to be so, God would have to override the free will of the writers, which sort of makes his promises to humanity deceitful lies.IntLibber wrote:One problem the darwinists have is they conflate two types of ID opinion:
a) those who think god had an influence on every step of evolution (strong creationism), and
b) those who think god created the universe to be the way it is, where life evolved as darwinists say it has done, because god wanted it that way, to result in the evolution of humans (weak creationism, which isn't that much different from the anthropic principle)
darwinists should, if they were smart, embrace the (b) types as fellow evolutionists who happen to believe that god exists where it is impossible for science to tread (i.e. before the creation of the universe, and outside of it now). instead they viciously attack would-be allies as believing in a fallacious 'god of the gaps', and they drive such moderates to sympathize with biblical literalist fundamentalist types who are supporters of strong creationism.
I wouldn't go that far. Weak creationism, as described, works fine without resorting to Deism (if I've understood the usage correctly).djolds1 wrote:Weak creationism seems to be Deism, which has a long and vibrant history in Western scientific thought.
It seems to me that giving up on religion and focusing on spirituality (get right with God and he will teach you the secrets of the universe) is the way forward.Skipjack wrote:Facts and science can never be amoralic. What people do with them is amoralic. To say that a scientific fact is bad, just because someone abused it for their whatever deeds is not productive.
Also nazism was an ideology (like every religion), which was to a large extent based on non facts and lies.
Also christianity has been a severe handicap for science. It was only due to a few individuals and their will to sacrifice everything for science that we ever got past renaissance.
And dont even get me started on all the sins of the (now catholic) church.
I could start with them killing Hypatia, then at least one of the destructions of the great library of Alexandria that goes on their accounts. After that Kepler, Gallilei and particularily G. Bruno and others would most loving sign of on that also. There are more instances, but I dont really feel like thinking them up right now. I just got home from work and I am tired.
93143 wrote:
I think it's unfair to blame Nazism primarily on Darwinism. What with people like Nietzsche and his anti-God, anti-egalitarian philosophy (which takes evolution's "this is the way things work" and turns it into "this is the way we should treat one another"), combined with the tangle of events resulting in WWI and aftermath (Bismarck anyone?), combined with the roots of anti-Semitism in Germany stretching all the way back to Peter the Hermit and his ilk, it seems to me to have been something of a perfect storm...
Skipjack wrote:Facts and science can never be amoralic. What people do with them is amoralic. To say that a scientific fact is bad, just because someone abused it for their whatever deeds is not productive.
Also nazism was an ideology (like every religion), which was to a large extent based on non facts and lies.
Skipjack wrote: Also christianity has been a severe handicap for science. It was only due to a few individuals and their will to sacrifice everything for science that we ever got past renaissance.
And dont even get me started on all the sins of the (now catholic) church.
I could start with them killing Hypatia, then at least one of the destructions of the great library of Alexandria that goes on their accounts. After that Kepler, Gallilei and particularily G. Bruno and others would most loving sign of on that also. There are more instances, but I dont really feel like thinking them up right now. I just got home from work and I am tired.
Ok, maybe I was using the wrong words then (please forgive me, I am not a native English speaker). I meant "of bad morale" or some other word for "evil". Science can not be evil. It is literally non discriminating, but always objective. People might want to abuse scientific theories and knowledge gathered through science for their own and sometimes evil means. So evil people can do bad things with science. Of course good or bad also always depends on your personal POV.Scientific detachment is the ability to look at things without emotion of feeling, and seems to me the very definition of A-Moralic.
I do have an explanation for that, but I cant say that in public.If Religion is holding back science why were all the breakthroughs in Christian lands and times ?
Skipjack wrote:I do have an explanation for that, but I cant say that in public.
Skipjack wrote:Ok, maybe I was using the wrong words then (please forgive me, I am not a native English speaker). I meant "of bad morale" or some other word for "evil". Science can not be evil. It is literally non discriminating, but always objective. People might want to abuse scientific theories and knowledge gathered through science for their own and sometimes evil means. So evil people can do bad things with science. Of course good or bad also always depends on your personal POV.Scientific detachment is the ability to look at things without emotion of feeling, and seems to me the very definition of A-Moralic.
E.g. being lawful does not automatically equal good (or otherwise every GESTAPO officer in Nazi Germany would have been a good person and I kinda doubt that).
If Religion is holding back science why were all the breakthroughs in Christian lands and times ?
Skipjack wrote: I do have an explanation for that, but I cant say that in public.
Yes, this is apparently true, and it's one of the reasons I keep saying "500years". In defense of the theory, I would point out that the Chinese civilization reached a plateau thousands of years ago and remained virtually unchanged till the English showed up with guns.Skipjack wrote: Taking that aside, if you look at the period before the last 500 years, you will notice that there was very little scientific progress made in that time.
Skipjack wrote: Generally I would not just limit it to the christian religion, but ideologies in general are by nature unscientific and against progress. I do not even distinguish between Christianity, Islam and Communism here.
They are all ideologies are therefore all based on some eternal values, eternal truths, dogmas, whatever you want to call it. These are the antithesis to progress and new knowledge. E.g. Suslov spoke very strongly against genetics, because they contradict the diamat, one of the collumns of soviet ideology. Some say, he even had geneticists rounded up and sent to Siberia, but I cant bring any quotations for that right now.