Back on-topic: elements of the Catholic church have tried hard to discredit the role of condoms in preventing HIV infection. http://www.guardian.co.uk/aids/story/0,7369,1059068,00.html
I like your post. You are right, most everything is theory, and this should be taught. Students coming out of public school really believe science knows all the things they were taught, and never try to learn anymore on their own. I believe they should be challenged in school to learn about the world by themselves. Give them the current beliefs of science and ask them to add to the knowledge.
Einstein said something like “it is a miracle our children have any curosity left after attending public school.”
Basic teachings of reading, writing, math, computer, and geography will give the skills needed to learn about the rest. I know this will never happen, because no one could claim to be an expert. Oh, well, It’s just a thought.
I am not a creationist in the Biblical sense, and I don’t think scientific theory is wild guesses, they are informed guesses, but guesses nevertheless, just tell everyone the truth.
I have my own guesses: Question 25 about Near Death Experiences.
But I admit it’s just my theory or guess up front.
Using the method of consenses of all is much better than having a group of people (scientists) tell us what to believe.
That’s why the Internet is so valuable to knowledge. All people can contribute, not just the rich.
No; the point is that they aren’t guesses - by the time something emerges as a scientific theory, that’s the same as science saying ‘this is as certain as we can possibly be right now’ - it doesn’t mean anything like a guess, regardless of the continual nitpicking from the creationist camp.
You might think evolution is not much more than a guess (and that’s an opinion and argument you’re fully entitled to), but when a scientist describes something as a theory, he means something a lot stronger and a lot closer to the common everyday definition of ‘fact’ - when you read someone else’s writings, you need to understand their definitions of their terms - anything else is just silly semantic games - in this case, you’d not be refuting anything they say, just deliberately misunderstanding them.
For example, I might decide that, to me, the word ‘computer’ actually means ‘block of cheese’ - I might even use the two terms interchangeably all my life and insist that I’m right; what definitely doesn’t happen is that the writings of my programming teacher suddenly become treatises on fermented milk products, except in my own fevered imagination.
Yes, please do tell everyone the truth - and that truth is that when scientists use the term ‘theory’, they mean something a lot stronger than ‘guess’!
I was interested to read your guesses, which I did find fascinating. As Mangetout said, you are entitled to your opinion and I will defend your right to display it on the internet. It did seem to me however that your opinion was based on little understanding of the theories you were comparing. (This is my opinion, I hope you think I am entitled to it).
I am not a scholar of Intelligent Design, and other similar postulates, so I am not really in a position to debate your discussion of that topic. However, in terms of the evolutionary and big bang models (which often seem to be considered one and the same by some creationists) I believe several of the questions that you consider to be unanswered have in fact been answered using scientific approaches. I think an understanding of the processes used to get to these answers (or theories, if you prefer) would greatly help.
Big Bang theory, and Evolution, are covered very well in the book Science Of The Discworld By Pratchett, Cohen and Stewart. I really, really recommend it - if my mum can understand it, everyone can. It describes the scientific method that has led to current understanding.
Which brings me on to my second point - you seem to think that scientists are a group of coordinated people, all agreed on what they want us to be taught. This is very far from the case - science is what you describe as the “method of consenses” - consider the disagreements on the aquatic ape theory, or the person who believes he has acheived cold fusion, but no one else’s results back him up.
Anyway… terribly sorry chaps, I’ve moved miles and miles from the OP. [/hijack]
I’m not sure that this counts as scientific theory being held up by religious beliefs, but quantum mechanics and chaos theory did provoke some people to consider the ramifications for an all-powerful being. The famous phrase “God doesn’t play dice with the universe” springs to mind.
No, let’s don’t confuse words. If you don’t know something, you use logic to form an opinion, that opinion is still a guess, let’s call it an educated guess if you please. But that doesn’t entitle you to tell others your educated guess is fact.
I just started from scratch using the terms others use, I wasn’t trying to compare theories, at least not intentionally. What I hoped to bring out is that we don’t know anymore about “God” than we do about His creation. Most people who denounce the existence of God do so because of how others define Him. If the preacher would admit that his knowledge of God was only theory, which it is, we could begin to get along with our search for understanding.
The role of the woman in conception was rejected for religious reasons, but not just by the Christian church. Even when sperm cells were first drawn after the use of the microscope, it tried to account for the homunculus theory that is throughout the Bible and the ancient and medieval world.
No; you’re just plain wrong about this and you’re still missing the point - deliberately, I suspect - in fact your definition of ‘theory’ doesn’t admit the possibility of anything being called anything more than an ‘educated guess’, which is just a stupid and arbitrary restriction of the language; an Orwellian move to control the range of possible thought by restricting the choice of words available to describe them.
If evolution is nothing more than an ‘educated guess’, please describe something - anything - worthy of being called a ‘fact’ and while we’re there, how about suggesting a term we can use when we mean ‘as fully and successfully tested an explanation as is possible given all available current evidence’ (as distinct from ‘a bit of idle/baseless speculation that I don’t particularly care to test against reality’, or ‘something we’re not all that sure about’)?
The thing you’re missing about science is the testability, the falsifiability, and the ability to make predictions. Evolution makes predictions about the kinds of things we should find in the fossil record, and the kinds of things we should not find. The Big Bang theory is not accepted today because it was a good guess, but because it predicted cosmic background radiation.
Intelligent design predicts that we should find structures that could not have been evolved. There are no such structures known today. That does not disprove it, but it weakens it. You are right that they are not necessarily at odds since Behe accepts evolution. But there is no need to accept intelligent design without strong evidence, the kind we have for evolution.
BTW I agree with you about the pitiful state of science education, caused in great part by the starving of our schools and by the kind of people who say “evolution is just a theory.” All kids leaving a science class should know some things not in serious doubt (like evolution) and some things for which we have no answers, such as the mechanism by which life began. They should also know about how to evaluate evidence, what a theory is, and about falsifiability. That’s far more important than memorizing the mass of Jupiter.
Is the homunculous theory really in the Bible? Do you recall where?
The evidence for Intelligent Design is very strong. Obviously the universe could not exit without it. Intelligence equals order, and order is apparent everywhere one looks.
What I hope to show is that Science won’t save the world any more than religion. We are people of intelligence, logic, and critical thinking as well as people of emotions, feelings, and intuitions. When we put the two together we get wisdom, the intelligence to make a bomb, along with the compassion not to use it. Don’t try to shortcut life by vaunting one and burying the other.
I think that term would be very educated guess, if you please.
I believe you argue that your very educated guess, is closer to fact than my very educated guess. Common argument or maybe I should say disagreement.
Something worthy of being called a fact: the existence of love and the existence of truth. If we own them we are very happy, if we don’t own them, start searching,
I think that term would be very educated guess, if you please.
I believe you argue that your very educated guess, is closer to fact than my very educated guess. Common argument or maybe I should say disagreement.
Something worthy of being called a fact: the existence of love and the existence of truth. If we own them we are very happy, if we don’t own them, start searching.
Ho ho ho! You know, when I first read this I interpreted it as meaning all scientists were rich! Ah ha ha ha ha! I can’t wait to tell all the people I work with we’re loaded! We’re rolling in it, baby! Why go to business school to become a CEO or law school to become a medial malpractice specialist when you can get your PhD and get the REAL big bucks!
Not by that name, but it was definitely believed that all a woman really contributed to conception was the place to keep the man’s “seed” (a term for semen that is not used figuratively- essentially semen was seen as the proto-baby and the woman as the “soil”). It was always a woman’s fault if she had no children (the lord would sometimes “open her womb”), be it Leah or Hannah or Ruth or Michal- never a fertility incompatibility issue. In some Muslim nations women can still be divorced for infertility though men cannot as it is by default a woman’s fault; likewise a woman can in many countries still be divorced for bearing only daughters in spite of the fact that the man contributes the gender of the child. (The Shah of Iran actually divorced his wife for failure to bear a son.)
It is ironic that the notion of a man delivering half of a blueprint into an egg inside the woman would have been considered a preposterous notion by people who believed in virgin and other miraculous births.
I really can’t see the point of such silly semantic quibbling; in many areas of life we have a range of words available to describe a range of intensities.
For example chilly>cold>cool>tepid>warm>hot>boiling>scalding>searing - what you’re suggesting is akin to replacing some of these with qualified, and less accurately descriptive, versions of the others; ‘hot’ is no more; we should call it ‘extra warm’ - ‘boiling’ likewise - we should call it ‘very extra warm’. ‘Scalding’? - no need for this term - we just say ‘really very extra warm’ - everybody will know exactly what we mean!
Not.
Regarding the question of whether scientific theories are just “guesses”:
I think the key thing to understand about scientific theories is that they are testable. You don’t just come up with a hypothesis to explain the data and then stop there. (That would be just an “educated guess”.) What you do is you propose your hypothesis and then conduct experiments that either gather evidence in favor of your theory, or against it. If the data keeps coming out in favor of your theory, then you have reason to think it’s a good one.
My problem with people presenting things like “intelligent design” as scientific theories is that they really don’t seem to be experimentally verifiable. How would you conduct an experiment to test whether an intelligence designed the universe? I don’t really think you can. In contrast, there’s lots of empirical evidence to support the theory of evolution. Every time a new strain of bacteria shows up with just the right properties to make it resistant to our antibiotics, that’s more corroborating evidence for natural selection.
I’m not rejecting the possibility that God had a hand in the development of species, but calling it a scientific theory in the absence of any possible experimental test is only going to mislead students about what a “scientific theory” really is.
Agreed; science is a methodology, whereby the closest possible approach to truth is sought by means of repeated falsification.
What lekatt is trying to do here though, is to obfuscate the distinction between various classes and strengths of idea by forcibly restricting the range of terms available to describe them.
I can’t imagine why anyone would do this if they considered their own ideas to be sound and solid - it’s nothing more than an attempt to debase highly-supported ideas down to a lower level, in order to make his own appear similar in weight.
Well said. It appears to be a favourite trick of creationists… I guess they don’t really have that much faith in heir ideas to begin with.