Frankly, the more I learn about it, the more amazed I am that such a mess works at all. We're unhappy if we are born with bad eye sight, or have an autistic child, but if you look at what's going on it's almost surprising we don't all come out mangled.
Its not too surprising to me. The way that mutation and natural selection works, it is mathematically very similar to a large neural net, with each instance of an organism probing a particular value of survivability in a region of the gene-space. It isn't too surprising that it works fairly well.
However, if you really want to talk about bugs in the code, look at diabetes. That is actually a functional mutation which protected our ancestors (particularly mine) from the cold -- it increases your blood sugar which acts like antifreeze and makes you drink lots of water which also helps protect cells against crystallization. Not such a good thing these days -- someone needs to refactor and remove that piece of code.
We used to claim that God was behind the Sun and Moon travelling across the sky, and know we know better.
Not really. We can just predict it better. We don't really know what gravity is. Maybe it is God's will that thinks move in a way that looks like gravity.
Or maybe he created a fundametal force we call gravity to do the work for him.
Or maybe there isn't much difference between the two.
Its not too surprising to me. The way that mutation and natural selection works, it is mathematically very similar to a large neural net, with each instance of an organism probing a particular value of survivability in a region of the gene-space. It isn't too surprising that it works fairly well.
I'm not communicating well, which is unfortunate because we are (I believe) in agreement. Neural nets are an apt comparison. Someone examining a neural net could easily look at it and say "I'm amazed this mess functions". Of course, they've witnessed it working and understand the mathematics behind it, but the solution is emergent and often oddly optimized. In short, the results look nothing like what someone would actually design.
Here's an interesting (to me) neural net story. A group needed to emulate an existing piece of hardware, so they wired it up to another board, which would learn the logic via neural network techniques so it could be converted to logic and then reproduced in software.
At the end, the software didn't work at all. The logic was all wrong. This was disturbing, because the learned circuit worked fine. They learned that the neural net had exploited the magnetic field of one line producing a charge in a parallel wire. The learned circuit literally had a gap in it, which was only functional due to "cheating". This is the kind of solution that emergent designs produce.
When you see a "design" like this, it's as much proof that something was not designed by an intelligent agent. Many features in DNA function in similarly bizarre and intractable ways.
Or maybe there isn't much difference between the two.
Since the first (God hypothesis) can "predict" anything and the second works pretty well in our world/galaxy, it's not surprising that most people tend to stick with their current world view unless they are forced to reconsider it.
For more on why people work this way, read up on cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. That a meme would evolve to resist questioning is not surprising at all.
The more we know the more we push back the argument that God is responsible for it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps). We used to claim that God was behind the Sun and Moon travelling across the sky, and know we know better.
I strongly disagree. The reality is that the more we know, the more confidence we have in our ability to know even more. But we must be careful to depend on "future discoveries" to support our current scientific position.
You also seem to believe in an interventionist God who "created things" out of the Lego set.
All Christians do. Yes, I said "all" (assuming "lego set" is an analogy).
The problem is that the more we learn about the Lego set, the less room there is for God to have been necessary in creating the diversity that we see, and the simplicity of the Lego set itself means that it is plausible it was created by randomness (particularly given a billion years across the entire planet).
Not really, for without understanding how it all came to be in the first place, we really do not understand how the diversity happened. We only have some unproven hypotheses on how we think it may have been possible without God. That is not convincing, but it does stimulate one to further study. When we actually cross that line we can reap the rewards of that knowledge, and only then have we earned the right to say we have conclusive evidence that it did not take an actual intelligence to produce it. And proof of similarities in dna doesn't cut it. Nor does proof of microevolution. The bar is a bit higher than that.
For more on why people work this way, read up on cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. That a meme would evolve to resist questioning is not surprising at all.
Yes I've seen this in many Evolution theory apologists. Mostly undergraduates...
For more on why people work this way, read up on cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. That a meme would evolve to resist questioning is not surprising at all.
Yes I've seen this in many Evolution theory apologists. Mostly undergraduates...
That's not apologists. Apologists is when you have a seeming contradiction, and then you work to explain why you don't think it is a contradiction at all, which is almost literally the definition of cognitive dissonance. Your brain is not one entity, it is literally many and they can be in disagreement with each other. Perhaps your "religious region" wants to believe one thing and your "logic lobe" wants to believe another. The brain does poorly if this is not resolved, so it solves the problem. If you are a normally functioning human, that is how you work. It doesn't suggest which view is right, or how to deconflict them, only that the brain takes steps to do so.
Not really, for without understanding how it all came to be in the first place, we really do not understand how the diversity happened. We only have some unproven hypotheses on how we think it may have been possible without God. That is not convincing, but it does stimulate one to further study. When we actually cross that line we can reap the rewards of that knowledge, and only then have we earned the right to say we have conclusive evidence that it did not take an actual intelligence to produce it. And proof of similarities in dna doesn't cut it. Nor does proof of microevolution. The bar is a bit higher than that.
You don't understand what evolution proves. There is no such proof as "it did not take an actual intelligence to produce it", only that it did not require an intelligence.
Let's use a more simple example, a mound. I am walking along and I see a mound in the middle of a field. How did it get there? Let's say I prove that it is possible to have been formed unintelligently. Perhaps it's in an earthquake zone or some such thing. Cool, I have proved this mound does not require any intelligence to produce. Someone else can still come up to me and say "I saw a gent with a shovel make that mound last week".
Evolution and all the copious proofs that support it cannot and do not prove that there is no creator. They do prove that it is possible for the diversity of life we have today to have arisen with no help along the way from any intelligence. God of the gaps doesn't mean we've 100% proven there is no god, only that the diversity of life is no proof that it must exist.
Oh, FYI there is no such thing as microevolution. Evolution is defined as a change in allele frequency in a species. Even if that allele only determines whether or not your growth spurt will occur at age 8 or age 8.5, it's still evolution. Microevolution is just an attempt to confuse terms, because some people are indifferent to real proof.
1. evolutionary change involving the gradual accumulation of mutations leading to new varieties within a species.
2. minor evolutionary change observed over a short period of time.
Let's use a more simple example, a mound. I am walking along and I see a mound in the middle of a field. How did it get there? Let's say I prove that it is possible to have been formed unintelligently. Perhaps it's in an earthquake zone or some such thing. Cool, I have proved this mound does not require any intelligence to produce. Someone else can still come up to me and say "I saw a gent with a shovel make that mound last week".
Here is the more important concept. Let's say I can convince a lot of people that the mound was created by a man with the shovel. That would mean it had a purpose (a levee maybe) which means the man creating the mound may attribute some sort of value to it. This implies that I may be making some sort of moral choice if I choose to destroy the mound. I would at least be going against the wishes of the person who created it.
On the other hand, lets say the mound was created "accidentally" and unintelligently by an earthquake, etc. This means that my destruction of the mound would have no moral implications.
Now, replace the mound with man. Can you see how, depending on which of these positions you take, your attitude towards man and how you treat people may be skewed by this core belief?
This is the main concern of Creationists regarding how far the TOE can be taken. It is what gave us Eugenics and the Nazi beliefs about Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, etc.
1. evolutionary change involving the gradual accumulation of mutations leading to new varieties within a species.
2. minor evolutionary change observed over a short period of time.
Dictionaries simply contain words as people use them. That is their purpose. I gave you the scientific definition of evolution. If you believe it does not contain "microevolution" you need to defend that position.
Here is the more important concept. Let's say I can convince a lot of people that the mound was created by a man with the shovel. That would mean it had a purpose (a levee maybe) which means the man creating the mound may attribute some sort of value to it. This implies that I may be making some sort of moral choice if I choose to destroy the mound. I would at least be going against the wishes of the person who created it.
Your convincing people to believe one way or another has no bearing on the value of the mound. Nor does the original intent of the mound - a levee might be essential one day and an obstacle the next. This is a morally bankrupt argument. If someone cannot consider the suffering of another intelligent being when deciding their actions, that makes them a psychopath, not an evolutionist.
Your continued reliance on Nazism is just noise now. For instance, the Nazis were not the first group to condone genocide or the mass killing of homosexuals. Consider Gomorrah or the commands in Joshua to kill every person of certain people groups.
If your thought experiment is true, then why does a highly secular society like Japan's have a much lower rate of murder than a very Christian culture like America's?
1. evolutionary change involving the gradual accumulation of mutations leading to new varieties within a species.
2. minor evolutionary change observed over a short period of time.
Dictionaries simply contain words as people use them. That is their purpose. I gave you the scientific definition of evolution. If you believe it does not contain "microevolution" you need to defend that position.
You said there was no such thing as Microevolution. I disagreed and gave authoritative proof. Beyond that, we can argue the definition of the word "is" ad nausium. Or we could always fall back on the ol' "it's not a theory, it's a hypothesis!" argument. Or we could argue about the price of Sarah Palin's wardrobe.
Your convincing people to believe one way or another has no bearing on the value of the mound.
That is absolutely correct.
It DOES, however, have a bearing on how they "treat" it or how they respond to how other people treat it. Why do you think so many people are calloused toward the killing, for convenience sake, of human babies that find themselves in the unenviable position of not being outside the womb? Or why the German citizens were similarly inclined toward those in the concentration camps throughout the German occupancy?
Your continued reliance on Nazism is just noise now. For instance, the Nazis were not the first group to condone genocide or the mass killing of homosexuals. Consider Gomorrah or the commands in Joshua to kill every person of certain people groups.
Or how about the probability that the USSR killed more Jews than Nazi Germany did.
I use the Nazi example because most people are familiar with it. That is the whole point of analogies - you use something people are aware of, as opposed to Gomorrah...
If your thought experiment is true, then why does a highly secular society like Japan's have a much lower rate of murder than a very Christian culture like America's?
Answers are not always as obvious as they may at first appear. I remember an episode of Star Trek the Next Generation where Wesley accidently crushed a plant in a park on a planet with a "virtually zero" crime rate. He was found guilty and the penalty was death. Gee, no wonder...
1. evolutionary change involving the gradual accumulation of mutations leading to new varieties within a species.
2. minor evolutionary change observed over a short period of time.
Dictionaries simply contain words as people use them. That is their purpose. I gave you the scientific definition of evolution. If you believe it does not contain "microevolution" you need to defend that position.
You said there was no such thing as Microevolution. I disagreed and gave authoritative proof.
1. a mythical creature resembling a horse, with a single horn in the center of its forehead: often symbolic of chastity or purity.
2. a heraldic representation of this animal, in the form of a horse with a lion's tail and with a long, straight, and spirally twisted horn.
Wow, it's in the dictionary. I gave you authoritative proof that unicorns exist. Maybe that's why proof from authority is a logical fallacy...?
Or perhaps we should concede that finding a word in the dictionary means it is commonly used, not that it is fictional.
I use the Nazi example because most people are familiar with it. That is the whole point of analogies - you use something people are aware of, as opposed to Gomorrah...
But, surely you are familiar with Gomorrah, right? Perhaps others are unfamiliar with it, but I am arguing a point with you, not everyone. So I used a reference that you must be familiar with.
1. a mythical creature resembling a horse, with a single horn in the center of its forehead: often symbolic of chastity or purity.
2. a heraldic representation of this animal, in the form of a horse with a lion's tail and with a long, straight, and spirally twisted horn.
Wow, it's in the dictionary. I gave you authoritative proof that unicorns exist. Maybe that's why proof from authority is a logical fallacy...?
Or perhaps we should concede that finding a word in the dictionary means it is commonly used, not that it is fictional.
The word is not fictional. What it describes is fictional, and the dictionary definition includes that critical information in the definition.
I really appreciate most of your posts here, RCC, even when we disagree, but I think you are barking up the wrong tree on this one. It really is an established definition and, actually, enhances discourse. It is good.
When participants in an argument begin using dictionaries to make their point, both sides have lost and should probably just stop talking to each other altogether.
When participants in an argument begin using dictionaries to make their point, both sides have lost and should probably just stop talking to each other altogether.
We used to claim that God was behind the Sun and Moon travelling across the sky, and know we know better.
Not really. We can just predict it better. We don't really know what gravity is. Maybe it is God's will that thinks move in a way that looks like gravity.
Or maybe he created a fundametal force we call gravity to do the work for him.
Or maybe there isn't much difference between the two.
Well, now you've trimmed down God to simply designing the laws of physics and then letting the Universe run its course -- which is much more of a Deist view of God or nothing more than a Prime Mover -- which usually isn't the kind of viewpoint that Creationists have. I've already mentioned this viewpoint before, you're not pointing out anything new to me.
Also, this is exactly the point that I'm trying to make. We've retreated from the point where God literally was inolved in pushing the Sun and Moon around the Earth, to the point where 12 billion years ago God designed the laws of physics which push around all the stars and planets and attract all the matter in the universe to itself, and Newton and Einstein have at least come close to an approximation of the ultimate design of God. So not only has God become considerably more remote and less interventionist, but also substantially more knowable. That is a remarkable retreat and I don't see why that trend should not continue.
This is like having a map which used to have only a very small area, all surrounded by "here be dragons", which has evolved to the point where it is very large and the "here be dragons" part has gotten narrower and narrower. At some point do we arrive at the point where we've explored the whole globe and there just aren't any dragons?
I strongly disagree. The reality is that the more we know, the more confidence we have in our ability to know even more. But we must be careful to depend on "future discoveries" to support our current scientific position.
You can disagree all you want, but fundamentally physics has been breaking down the fundamental building blocks into simpler and simpler legos. There's the complexity of putting the legos together, which is still an interesting area of discovery, but we keep taking observed phenomena and unifying them (unifying the apples fall with the motion of the planets, unifying electricity and magnetism, unifying chemistry and electromagnetics, etc).
Complexity can be difficult to understand exactly, but we can show that its knowable. There isn't anything magical about the action of DNA that can't be explained by the underlying chemistry of the DNA alphabet. Its just computationally impossible to solve a quantum mechanical wave equation describing a million base pair DNA strand, you don't have to involve magic to explain complexity, however, and approximation methods have gotten better and better at removing the magic of complexity.
I use the Nazi example because most people are familiar with it. That is the whole point of analogies - you use something people are aware of, as opposed to Gomorrah...
it is almost always viewed as being intellectually lazy, tends to obscure more than it enlightens, and nearly always offends people due to it cheapening the actual magnitude of the holocaust.
which explains why you find it such an attractive analogy.
I use the Nazi example because most people are familiar with it. That is the whole point of analogies - you use something people are aware of, as opposed to Gomorrah...
it is almost always viewed as being intellectually lazy, tends to obscure more than it enlightens, and nearly always offends people due to it cheapening the actual magnitude of the holocaust.
which explains why you find it such an attractive analogy.
I actually think there may be some truth to what you say, with the exception of the last sentence, of course. But I wouldn't call it lazy. More expedient than lazy. It makes the point directly, but as you say, could bring so much noise with it that the direct point is obscured.
One thing does seem very clear, however; science is only beginning to get a handle on the big picture of global warming. Findings like these tell us it's too early to know for sure if man's impact is affecting things at the political cry of "alarming rates." We may simply be going through another natural cycle of warmer and colder times - one that's been observed through a scientific analysis of the Earth to be naturally occuring for hundreds of thousands of years.
It seriously looks like the more we discover, the sillier the "man made global warming" myth looks.
It seriously looks like the more we discover, the sillier the "man made global warming" myth looks.
Hahaha? Did you read the article? Your quote is just byline from the author, and he's not the expert. Here's what the actual scientists say.
The key thing is to better determine the relative roles of increased methane emission versus [an increase] in the rate of removal. Apparently we have a mix of the two, but we want to know how much of each [is responsible for the overall increase]."
They haven't even ruled out the possibility that the increase is due to a lower rate of attachment to free radicals. If you get to the bottom of the page however, you'll also notice this comment.
Several comments suggest a massive 2007 Siberian permafrost melt accounts for the observed increases in atmospheric methane.
So, this article does not invalidates the man-made global warming hypothesis. It does supports the "death spiral" feared by some, that extra heat will melt ice and release more captured greenhouse gases.
So, this article does not invalidates the man-made global warming hypothesis. It does supports the "death spiral" feared by some, that extra heat will melt ice and release more captured greenhouse gases.
No it does not invalidate anything. It DOES however demonstrate another support for the idea that you can remove the question mark from the title of this thread.
There is no longer a "consensus". Those days are gone.
These assessments have largely followed or endorsed the IPCC position that "An increasing body of observations gives a collective picture of a warming world and other changes in the climate system... There is new and stronger evidence that most of the warming observed over the last 50 years is attributable to human activities."
That's the consensus opinion. That's what it's been for a few years now. The consensus is that humans are likely the primary cause, and the certainty is strong enough that action should be taken to reduce greenhouse emissions. This new finding will undoubtedly produce new research, which is how the scientific method works. You like analogies, so how about I use the only one you seem to understand (I feel so dirty)?
By March 1938, people had enough information to know that Hitler was going to be trouble. There was consensus that he was dangerous, but everyone was too worried about the cost of acting. That's how we got WWII.
There you go, In global warming you are Neville Chamberlain; denying a problem even when it's obvious, because there is just enough doubt that you think you can wish the problem away.
This is such an interesting topic. Those who believe man is causing global warming cite "consensus" as some sort of proof. Of course no one with a background in science would do such a thing, since they know consensus does not equal proof. Yet we hear it again and again. Shouldn't they be citing proof instead of consensus? Does anyone remember the "scientific method?"
This is such an interesting topic. Those who believe man is causing global warming cite "consensus" as some sort of proof. Of course no one with a background in science would do such a thing, since they know consensus does not equal proof. Yet we hear it again and again. Shouldn't they be citing proof instead of consensus? Does anyone remember the "scientific method?"
Yes, but apparently you do not. Here's the scientific method.
1) Form a testable hypothesis.
2) Construe experiments which will test the hypothesis.
3) Run experiments.
4) Examine results to discover if they prove or disprove your hypothesis
5) Publish the results.
The reason people point out the scientific consensus is to make it clear how many of the experiments have pointed to man-made GW, and because the system is so complex that it takes considerable effort to understand it. If you release a news release that says "UV reflection of CO2 proven to be 1% higher in practice than expected: supports global warming hypothesis", you'll lose your audience.
Let me put it this way, the percentage of scientists who accept gravity, atomic theory, the germ theory of disease, evolution, and global warming are all statistically within the margin of error for a typical poll.
Comments
Its not too surprising to me. The way that mutation and natural selection works, it is mathematically very similar to a large neural net, with each instance of an organism probing a particular value of survivability in a region of the gene-space. It isn't too surprising that it works fairly well.
However, if you really want to talk about bugs in the code, look at diabetes. That is actually a functional mutation which protected our ancestors (particularly mine) from the cold -- it increases your blood sugar which acts like antifreeze and makes you drink lots of water which also helps protect cells against crystallization. Not such a good thing these days -- someone needs to refactor and remove that piece of code.
Not really. We can just predict it better. We don't really know what gravity is. Maybe it is God's will that thinks move in a way that looks like gravity.
Or maybe he created a fundametal force we call gravity to do the work for him.
Or maybe there isn't much difference between the two.
I'm not communicating well, which is unfortunate because we are (I believe) in agreement. Neural nets are an apt comparison. Someone examining a neural net could easily look at it and say "I'm amazed this mess functions". Of course, they've witnessed it working and understand the mathematics behind it, but the solution is emergent and often oddly optimized. In short, the results look nothing like what someone would actually design.
Here's an interesting (to me) neural net story. A group needed to emulate an existing piece of hardware, so they wired it up to another board, which would learn the logic via neural network techniques so it could be converted to logic and then reproduced in software.
At the end, the software didn't work at all. The logic was all wrong. This was disturbing, because the learned circuit worked fine. They learned that the neural net had exploited the magnetic field of one line producing a charge in a parallel wire. The learned circuit literally had a gap in it, which was only functional due to "cheating". This is the kind of solution that emergent designs produce.
When you see a "design" like this, it's as much proof that something was not designed by an intelligent agent. Many features in DNA function in similarly bizarre and intractable ways.
Since the first (God hypothesis) can "predict" anything and the second works pretty well in our world/galaxy, it's not surprising that most people tend to stick with their current world view unless they are forced to reconsider it.
For more on why people work this way, read up on cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias. That a meme would evolve to resist questioning is not surprising at all.
That's not apologists. Apologists is when you have a seeming contradiction, and then you work to explain why you don't think it is a contradiction at all, which is almost literally the definition of cognitive dissonance. Your brain is not one entity, it is literally many and they can be in disagreement with each other. Perhaps your "religious region" wants to believe one thing and your "logic lobe" wants to believe another. The brain does poorly if this is not resolved, so it solves the problem. If you are a normally functioning human, that is how you work. It doesn't suggest which view is right, or how to deconflict them, only that the brain takes steps to do so.
You don't understand what evolution proves. There is no such proof as "it did not take an actual intelligence to produce it", only that it did not require an intelligence.
Let's use a more simple example, a mound. I am walking along and I see a mound in the middle of a field. How did it get there? Let's say I prove that it is possible to have been formed unintelligently. Perhaps it's in an earthquake zone or some such thing. Cool, I have proved this mound does not require any intelligence to produce. Someone else can still come up to me and say "I saw a gent with a shovel make that mound last week".
Evolution and all the copious proofs that support it cannot and do not prove that there is no creator. They do prove that it is possible for the diversity of life we have today to have arisen with no help along the way from any intelligence. God of the gaps doesn't mean we've 100% proven there is no god, only that the diversity of life is no proof that it must exist.
Oh, FYI there is no such thing as microevolution. Evolution is defined as a change in allele frequency in a species. Even if that allele only determines whether or not your growth spurt will occur at age 8 or age 8.5, it's still evolution. Microevolution is just an attempt to confuse terms, because some people are indifferent to real proof.
From http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/apologist
a person who makes a defense in speech or writing of a belief, idea, etc.
From http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/microevolution
1. evolutionary change involving the gradual accumulation of mutations leading to new varieties within a species.
2. minor evolutionary change observed over a short period of time.
I need no more proof that God exists.
Here is the more important concept. Let's say I can convince a lot of people that the mound was created by a man with the shovel. That would mean it had a purpose (a levee maybe) which means the man creating the mound may attribute some sort of value to it. This implies that I may be making some sort of moral choice if I choose to destroy the mound. I would at least be going against the wishes of the person who created it.
On the other hand, lets say the mound was created "accidentally" and unintelligently by an earthquake, etc. This means that my destruction of the mound would have no moral implications.
Now, replace the mound with man. Can you see how, depending on which of these positions you take, your attitude towards man and how you treat people may be skewed by this core belief?
This is the main concern of Creationists regarding how far the TOE can be taken. It is what gave us Eugenics and the Nazi beliefs about Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, etc.
Dictionaries simply contain words as people use them. That is their purpose. I gave you the scientific definition of evolution. If you believe it does not contain "microevolution" you need to defend that position.
Your convincing people to believe one way or another has no bearing on the value of the mound. Nor does the original intent of the mound - a levee might be essential one day and an obstacle the next. This is a morally bankrupt argument. If someone cannot consider the suffering of another intelligent being when deciding their actions, that makes them a psychopath, not an evolutionist.
Your continued reliance on Nazism is just noise now. For instance, the Nazis were not the first group to condone genocide or the mass killing of homosexuals. Consider Gomorrah or the commands in Joshua to kill every person of certain people groups.
If your thought experiment is true, then why does a highly secular society like Japan's have a much lower rate of murder than a very Christian culture like America's?
It DOES, however, have a bearing on how they "treat" it or how they respond to how other people treat it. Why do you think so many people are calloused toward the killing, for convenience sake, of human babies that find themselves in the unenviable position of not being outside the womb? Or why the German citizens were similarly inclined toward those in the concentration camps throughout the German occupancy?
Yes, I see moral equivalence there.
I use the Nazi example because most people are familiar with it. That is the whole point of analogies - you use something people are aware of, as opposed to Gomorrah...
Meanwhile, there is this from the REAL world.
http://www.verumserum.com/?p=1518
Besides, the Japanese prefer suicide to homicide.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/w ... 170649.ece
From http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/unicorn
1. a mythical creature resembling a horse, with a single horn in the center of its forehead: often symbolic of chastity or purity.
2. a heraldic representation of this animal, in the form of a horse with a lion's tail and with a long, straight, and spirally twisted horn.
Wow, it's in the dictionary. I gave you authoritative proof that unicorns exist. Maybe that's why proof from authority is a logical fallacy...?
Or perhaps we should concede that finding a word in the dictionary means it is commonly used, not that it is fictional.
But, surely you are familiar with Gomorrah, right? Perhaps others are unfamiliar with it, but I am arguing a point with you, not everyone. So I used a reference that you must be familiar with.
Also, mine was a counterexample, not an analogy.
I really appreciate most of your posts here, RCC, even when we disagree, but I think you are barking up the wrong tree on this one. It really is an established definition and, actually, enhances discourse. It is good.
I'm dubbing this "Alan's law".
Well, now you've trimmed down God to simply designing the laws of physics and then letting the Universe run its course -- which is much more of a Deist view of God or nothing more than a Prime Mover -- which usually isn't the kind of viewpoint that Creationists have. I've already mentioned this viewpoint before, you're not pointing out anything new to me.
Also, this is exactly the point that I'm trying to make. We've retreated from the point where God literally was inolved in pushing the Sun and Moon around the Earth, to the point where 12 billion years ago God designed the laws of physics which push around all the stars and planets and attract all the matter in the universe to itself, and Newton and Einstein have at least come close to an approximation of the ultimate design of God. So not only has God become considerably more remote and less interventionist, but also substantially more knowable. That is a remarkable retreat and I don't see why that trend should not continue.
This is like having a map which used to have only a very small area, all surrounded by "here be dragons", which has evolved to the point where it is very large and the "here be dragons" part has gotten narrower and narrower. At some point do we arrive at the point where we've explored the whole globe and there just aren't any dragons?
You can disagree all you want, but fundamentally physics has been breaking down the fundamental building blocks into simpler and simpler legos. There's the complexity of putting the legos together, which is still an interesting area of discovery, but we keep taking observed phenomena and unifying them (unifying the apples fall with the motion of the planets, unifying electricity and magnetism, unifying chemistry and electromagnetics, etc).
Complexity can be difficult to understand exactly, but we can show that its knowable. There isn't anything magical about the action of DNA that can't be explained by the underlying chemistry of the DNA alphabet. Its just computationally impossible to solve a quantum mechanical wave equation describing a million base pair DNA strand, you don't have to involve magic to explain complexity, however, and approximation methods have gotten better and better at removing the magic of complexity.
it is almost always viewed as being intellectually lazy, tends to obscure more than it enlightens, and nearly always offends people due to it cheapening the actual magnitude of the holocaust.
which explains why you find it such an attractive analogy.
Caveots aside, It does apply though.
This just gets interestinger and interestinger:
http://www.tgdaily.com/html_tmp/content ... 3-113.html
Nice excerpt:
It seriously looks like the more we discover, the sillier the "man made global warming" myth looks.
Hahaha? Did you read the article? Your quote is just byline from the author, and he's not the expert. Here's what the actual scientists say.
They haven't even ruled out the possibility that the increase is due to a lower rate of attachment to free radicals. If you get to the bottom of the page however, you'll also notice this comment.
So, this article does not invalidates the man-made global warming hypothesis. It does supports the "death spiral" feared by some, that extra heat will melt ice and release more captured greenhouse gases.
There is no longer a "consensus". Those days are gone.
It doesn't take much to figure out what the consensus is. Shoot, here's the wikapedia article even.
That's the consensus opinion. That's what it's been for a few years now. The consensus is that humans are likely the primary cause, and the certainty is strong enough that action should be taken to reduce greenhouse emissions. This new finding will undoubtedly produce new research, which is how the scientific method works. You like analogies, so how about I use the only one you seem to understand (I feel so dirty)?
By March 1938, people had enough information to know that Hitler was going to be trouble. There was consensus that he was dangerous, but everyone was too worried about the cost of acting. That's how we got WWII.
There you go, In global warming you are Neville Chamberlain; denying a problem even when it's obvious, because there is just enough doubt that you think you can wish the problem away.
Yes, but apparently you do not. Here's the scientific method.
1) Form a testable hypothesis.
2) Construe experiments which will test the hypothesis.
3) Run experiments.
4) Examine results to discover if they prove or disprove your hypothesis
5) Publish the results.
The reason people point out the scientific consensus is to make it clear how many of the experiments have pointed to man-made GW, and because the system is so complex that it takes considerable effort to understand it. If you release a news release that says "UV reflection of CO2 proven to be 1% higher in practice than expected: supports global warming hypothesis", you'll lose your audience.
Let me put it this way, the percentage of scientists who accept gravity, atomic theory, the germ theory of disease, evolution, and global warming are all statistically within the margin of error for a typical poll.