I think the Republican Party supports science denial - Here is Why (1 Viewer)

shader said:

When you were religious, you would laugh at people that believed in a god?  That makes very little sense

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shader said:

Intelligent design is something believed by virtually anyone who is a “religious person”, not just “creationists”

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shader said:

sn0mm1s said:

Gravity could just be invisible angels pushing down on us. 

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 I stopped reading at “Gravity could just be invisible angels pushing down on us.” No need for that kind of disrespect. 

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While Kepler was discovering these laws, Galileo was studying the laws of motion. The problem was, what makes the planets go around? (In those days, one of the theories proposed was that the planets went around because behind them were invisible angels, beating their wings and driving the planets forward. You will see that this theory is now modified! It turns out that in order to keep the planets going around, the invisible angels must fly in a different direction and they have no wings. Otherwise, it is a somewhat similar theory!)

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Maurile Tremblay said:

That’s not disrespect. It’s pretty close to our current theory of gravity.

Richard Feynman:

Feynman is pointing out that we now know that gravity doesn’t exert a force around the sun, but actually pulls planets directly toward the sun. Beyond that, we really don’t understand how gravity works. We know about the strength of the force and we know its direction, but we don’t know why objects are attracted to each other. We invented a name for it, “gravity,” but to give something a name is not to explain or understand it. We could just as easily have named it “Gabriel.” After all, since the force is toward the sun, maybe the sun is the angel!

It’s a deep point, and I highly recommend listening to that lecture in Feynman’s own voice if you have time. For the part about how angels might drive gravity, start at about minute 17:00.

In any event, I think the point that’s relevant to this thread is that saying “the force of gravity varies inversely with the square of the distance” is functionally equivalent to saying “the force of gravity varies inversely with the square of the distance because that’s how the angels like it.” The two statements make all the same predictions, so they are really the exact same theory — just different interpretations.

In precisely the same way, tacking “because God is guiding it” onto standard evolutionary theory doesn’t really change anything. It’s fine if you want to tack it on, but it’s not scientifically necessary.

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Maurile Tremblay said:

Pretty much all theists are creationists if we redefine “creationist” to mean “someone who believes that God created the universe.”

Pretty much all theists believe in “intelligent design” if we redefine “intelligent design” to mean “the idea that the universe was designed by an intelligent will.”

Under those definitions, both creationism and intelligent design would be perfectly compatible with our best scientific knowledge.

But that’s not how those terms are commonly used. In modern English, creationism generally denotes the idea that God populated the earth with different kinds of animals a mere few thousand years ago. And intelligent design generally denotes the idea that natural, unassisted evolutionary theory is incapable of explaining certain features of bioligical organisms because those features are irreducibly complex.

Under their common English meanings, both creationism and intelligent design are, scientifically speaking, hogwash. They are not believed by “virtually anyone who is a religious person.”

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Maurile Tremblay said:

That’s not disrespect. It’s pretty close to our current theory of gravity.

Richard Feynman:

Feynman is pointing out that we now know that gravity doesn’t exert a force around the sun, but actually pulls planets directly toward the sun. Beyond that, we really don’t understand how gravity works. We know about the strength of the force and we know its direction, but we don’t know why objects are attracted to each other. We invented a name for it, “gravity,” but to give something a name is not to explain or understand it. We could just as easily have named it “Gabriel.” After all, since the force is toward the sun, maybe the sun is the angel!

It’s a deep point, and I highly recommend listening to that lecture in Feynman’s own voice if you have time. For the part about how angels might drive gravity, start at about minute 17:00.

In any event, I think the point that’s relevant to this thread is that saying “the force of gravity varies inversely with the square of the distance” is functionally equivalent to saying “the force of gravity varies inversely with the square of the distance because that’s how the angels like it.” The two statements make all the same predictions, so they are really the exact same theory — just different interpretations.

In precisely the same way, tacking “because God is guiding it” onto standard evolutionary theory doesn’t really change anything. It’s fine if you want to tack it on, but it’s not scientifically necessary.

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Insomniac said:

This is a bit beyond me but I believe that the current scientific consensus is that General Relativity is the best base for explanation of gravity, replacing Newton's "Law of Gravity". (note when I've seen it referred to more recently it's called Newton's Gravitional Theory)  Einstein believed that mass distorting space/time was the cause of gravity. Almost certainly someone, someday will come up with a more precise explanation. The differences will be on the edges, as was General Relativity compared to Newton.

OTOH Intelligent Design has unsolvable problems as a scientific theory. How does it explain all of the dead ends of evolution? Something like 99.9% of all species that ever existed are extinct. I read Ever Since Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould decades ago and recall him giving a number of examples of species that died out because of their evolutionary traits that eventually made them unsuitable to their envirionment. Why would an omnipotent, omniscient designer have such a high failure rate?

Intelligent Design is a theological belief not a Scientific belief. As Robert Heinlan once wrote "One man's theology is another man's belly laugh".

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shader said:

This is quite interesting and I look forward to listening.

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Opie said:

Remember this from just last week?

Debunked already

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