Oh I'm not talking about God in the least. I'm talking about Intelligent Design, which has been completely and utterly demolished as a scientific explanation for anything. If someone acts as if there's any sort of controversy between ID and Evolution, it earmarks them as being uninformed. I'm sorry if that winds up including yourself, but you can hardly be blamed for not knowing things you haven't studied :p
The claims that the Intelligent Design school of thought makes are completely unscientific in nature. It's a religion, religions can't be tested and offer no predictive power. ID was shown to be religious in nature, watch that Nova special, it was pretty cool. Basically the court found that Intelligent Design was a religious movement and therefore could not be taught in schools.
The thing is that science doesn't really have a way of disproving the supernatural, specifically because it focuses only on what is natural and is measurable. The way science works is that you make a positive claim and then try to disprove it, but there is no logical process for proving a negative premise. You can't prove there's no God, just as you can't prove there's no Flying Spaghetti Monster or no Invisible Pink Unicorn. I mean, just think about claiming "there are no star-shaped blue rocks on planet Earth." That claim can't be effectively proven true, because it's pretty much impossible to look everywhere. Someone saying they looked everywhere for a rock of that sort and didn't find one can be immediately countered with "well you didn't look in the right places." It's the same with God, it's not a matter that can be scientifically examined, really. Personally, that's the reason for me not believing it, but for the religious it is CONCRETE proof that there is no INHERENT conflict between science and religious belief.
I emphasize "inherent" because I've no problem with religion when it stays in its own field. It doesn't argue with science when it does that. But when a religion makes truth claims that deny established science, it's the religion that has to go, not the science (for example, Intelligent Design). Buddhism recognizes this, I believe, as does most of christianity to be honest... it's really only in the U.S. that you get people denying science in favor of religion... I was kind of surprised to hear in my conversations in Ireland that that sort of thing just doesn't really happen anywhere else, at least not on the scale it does in the U.S.
Like, for example, I've no real problem with a deist idea of God, or a moderate one really... but I find that the god in the Bible as well as the Jesus story to be just as unbelievable as Zeus and Thor. A Jesus philosophy would be nice, I think the guy in the story had a lot of great ideas... some not-so-good ones, granted, but some good ones as well. When you take out the rituals, the threats, and the institutionalization, christianity has some nice ideas, it's just that in America hardly anybody really practices them anymore.
Anyway, I'm rambling. No need to write an essay!
Not sure why you'd need to say "don fire suit," it's not like I'm going to yell at you :p
The claims that the Intelligent Design school of thought makes are completely unscientific in nature. It's a religion, religions can't be tested and offer no predictive power. ID was shown to be religious in nature, watch that Nova special, it was pretty cool. Basically the court found that Intelligent Design was a religious movement and therefore could not be taught in schools.
The thing is that science doesn't really have a way of disproving the supernatural, specifically because it focuses only on what is natural and is measurable. The way science works is that you make a positive claim and then try to disprove it, but there is no logical process for proving a negative premise. You can't prove there's no God, just as you can't prove there's no Flying Spaghetti Monster or no Invisible Pink Unicorn. I mean, just think about claiming "there are no star-shaped blue rocks on planet Earth." That claim can't be effectively proven true, because it's pretty much impossible to look everywhere. Someone saying they looked everywhere for a rock of that sort and didn't find one can be immediately countered with "well you didn't look in the right places." It's the same with God, it's not a matter that can be scientifically examined, really. Personally, that's the reason for me not believing it, but for the religious it is CONCRETE proof that there is no INHERENT conflict between science and religious belief.
I emphasize "inherent" because I've no problem with religion when it stays in its own field. It doesn't argue with science when it does that. But when a religion makes truth claims that deny established science, it's the religion that has to go, not the science (for example, Intelligent Design). Buddhism recognizes this, I believe, as does most of christianity to be honest... it's really only in the U.S. that you get people denying science in favor of religion... I was kind of surprised to hear in my conversations in Ireland that that sort of thing just doesn't really happen anywhere else, at least not on the scale it does in the U.S.
Like, for example, I've no real problem with a deist idea of God, or a moderate one really... but I find that the god in the Bible as well as the Jesus story to be just as unbelievable as Zeus and Thor. A Jesus philosophy would be nice, I think the guy in the story had a lot of great ideas... some not-so-good ones, granted, but some good ones as well. When you take out the rituals, the threats, and the institutionalization, christianity has some nice ideas, it's just that in America hardly anybody really practices them anymore.
Anyway, I'm rambling. No need to write an essay!
Not sure why you'd need to say "don fire suit," it's not like I'm going to yell at you :p
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