Thank God for Christianity!
DerbyX @ Fri Aug 05, 2005 7:30 pm
I've seen this happen before.
I've been editing a post and reading off of the previous posts but then when you post the post you were reading off has dissappeard. It is a bit confusing at times.
Zipperfish @ Fri Aug 05, 2005 10:50 pm
Blue_Nose Blue_Nose:
Zipperfish Zipperfish:
It's all about belief. Less than half of Americans believe in evolution. They choose not to believe science. Many people I talk to do not believe that the average global tmperature is increasing, despite evidence to the contrary. They choose not to believe in science.
Hi Bluenose,
If I choose not to believe in friction, does that make friction a belief instead of a real physical force?
People can deny evolution all they want, but they're ignorant. That doesn't make evolution less real. Evolution occured, and has been shown to have occured in thousands of circumstances.
Now, saying that evolution disproves the existance of God by refuting the Bible is a belief. That's the difference.
Well, to a certain extent we want scientists to deny evolution -- or at least to question it. We want them to probe every single weak spot in the theory. That's a strength of science -- it thrives on scepticism.
As for evolution, I agree with you. There was a study some time ago that showed how moths in a part of England that was particuarlly polluted with coal dust changed colour (to black) over generations to adapt to their surroundings. A real time example of evolution at work.
As for friction, I guess it's real enough. I'm thinking more in terms of a lot of the work in quantum physics going on right now, as well as some of the science in artificial intelligence (particularly Turing) and logic (Godel). The really interesting thing about Godel's Incompleteness Theorem is that no computer or artificial intelligence yet contemplated could have proved his theorem -- only the human mind. To this end, I highly recommend a book called Godel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Roger Penrose has written extensively on the subject as well.
Godel showed that there are unprovable statements in mathematics. Michael Guillen said: "the only possible way of avowing an unprovable truth, mathematical or otherwise, is to accept it as an article of faith."
The brilliant Bertrand Russell lamented: "I wanted certainty in the kind of way in which people want religious faith. I thought that certainty is more likely to be found in mathematics than anywhere...But after some twenty years of arduous toil, I came to the conclusion that there was nothing more that I could do in the way of making mathematical knowledge indubitable."
And finally Hawking relates this tale in a A Brief History of Time:
$1:
A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on.” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
And it appears that it is -- turtles all the way down, I mean.