You seem to have higher standards than God, after all he designed the human body to spontaneously kill 60% of all conceptions (babies in the prolife view) naturally.
I will never understand this view it does not come from nature or from scripture, in fact God kills millions of babies every year as a normal body process.
Could you please provide a cite for that figure as well? Not that I don’t believe you, I’d just like to read more up on that myself.
ETA- **Icerigger **- You’re mixing “spontainous abortion” with “clinical abortion”.
Most, perhaps all, politicians are flip-floppers. They each tend to have a few positions they won’t budge on, and every other issue is negotiable.
It appears to me that Gov. Palin is open to the idea of “Creation Science” being in the public school curriculum but doesn’t insist on it. That she recognizes it as a science at all puts her in deep conflict with me, Diogenes, and a lot of other people on this board. The question of how strongly she supported teaching it in the public schools isn’t likely to change many votes around here.
Aside: I am beginning to agree with those who say it’s annoying to have a new thread for every little facet of the McCain-Palin / Obama-Biden debate.
What is the difference? The pro-life position is almost entirely religious, God forbids abortion, well God designed a woman’s body to kill the majority of all babies conceived.
I’m interested in hearing more about this. Why do you allow for these 5%? If you’re against abortion, why do you exclude these categories? I am particularly surprised regarding the fetal deformity exclusion. Also, I don’t know what difference rape or incest make. Can you expand on your reasons?
Do you seriously not comprehend the difference between the medical term for a miscarriage and a purposeful medical procedure? Really?
Relevent nitpick: it’s always going to be “still theory” - a “theory” is as high as it can possibly get, as a description of a process. The things in science we call “laws” are as a rule mathematical formulas; the law of gravity for example being Newton’s Universal Law of Gravitation: F = G * m1 * m2 / d2.
Calling evolution “just a theory” or denigrating it for still being one are mistakes made from ignorance of what a scientific theory is. It’s such a common mistake that it’s difficult to justify sneering at anyone for making it though.
Sorry - I saw the line beginning with “Evolutionists insist” and thought it was the start of a sentence. Why would you capitalize “Evolutionist” anyway?
Regardless, it’s immaterial to the question of educating students whether “some” people who accept evolution are Godless Heathens. Science teachers do not jam atheism down students’ throats when teaching evolution.
It’s really not tricky teaching evolution. You rely on facts and evidence. No fancy opening statements, dodging or weaving are necessary. And it’s not necessary to bring in outmoded, scientifically indefensible alternative theories either. When discussing the germ theory of disease we do not feel it necessary to “teach the controversy” and drag in Bechamp, spontaneous generation etc.
I strongly disagree. What this shows is that the person is either scientifically illiterate, or pandering to the religious base. Look at the way Bush’s administration has pushed around government scientists on environmental issues. Also remember that one of the US’s big international advantages is our scientific research, largely helped by government programs. If the government stays anti-science, or even just anti-evolutionary biology for long enough we can expect to see that advantage erode.
Pretty much all of it.
BUT, the word “theory” in science does not have the same meaning as it does in the venacular sense of something hypothetical or unproven.
Basically, a scientific theory is defined as an explanation for an observed phenomenon or set of phenomenon which is well supported by evidence. It does not mean “unproven.” No amount of evidence can turn a theory into a law. A law is a “what”, a theory is a “why.” A hypothesis does not become a theory unless it is very well supported by falsifiable tests.
The atom is a theory, gravity is a theory, cold germs are a theory. That does not mean these things are not proven beyond any legitimate doubt.
Addressing evolutionary theory specifically, it should first be said that it has nothing to do with the origin of the univers, the Earth or even life. Evolution only explains what happened after life began on Earth. The ToE is one of the best supported theories in all of science and has held up in the face of arguably the most aggressive and persistent challenges. It has been subjected to millions of falsifiable tests over a 150 years and has never failed a test or been wrong about a prediction. It would be easy to falsify. All you have to do is find one fossil out of place in the geological column. One human femur in a pre-cambrian layer would kick evolution righht in the balls. Yet out of millions of fossils recovered, not a single one has ever been found outside of where evolutionary theory would predict.
So yeah, it’s still a “theory” and will always be a theory, but for all practical purposes it can be regarded as a proven fact, and it is the working assumption behind all of biological science. Evolution is to biology what atomic theory is to physics.
No.
What nonsense. God also rigged the system to kill millions of people every year. Many of them are killed naturally by the actions of other human beings. What an unthinking God.
The answer to such nonsense is that the fact that some fetuses spontaneously abort due to abnormality, or sickness, or whatever, doesn’t have anything to do with what human beings do volitionally to a fetus. That’s comparing apples and oranges. Even those who are in favor of allowing abortion would necessarily concede that fact.
Diogenes, the trouble with your reply, which otherwise is an excellent summation of the situation, is that you simply cannot equate the theories by which we explain what we see around us with “fact.” Fact is something provably true. Theories about what happened when we were not around, no matter how valid they are at explaining what we see, and predicting what we will see, are not fact.
It is a fact I drive a blue car.
It is not a fact that dinosaurs roamed the earth. It is quite probable that they did, and that theory does a good job of explaining the petrified bones we find at certain strata of rocks, but I cannot establish concretely that those bones didn’t get there some other way, perhaps a way that involves some “divine” origin.
What science is supposed to do is ignore the potential metaphysical origins of what we see as irrelevant to the mission of science: make predictions about the world around us based upon our observations. That’s the great leap forward we made from the time of the Greeks and Romans, whose world was governed by the unpredictable actions of divine power, making such efforts unimportant in the main. Since I cannot predict the result of metaphysical intervention, I ignore the possibility and instead address what I do know to be true and try to determine what else likely is true as a result. Dinosaurs probably roamed the Earth, so probably that I’m willing to take it as a given, but I should never elevate it to the status of “Truth.”
Both sides of the issue make the same error at times. There are scientists who forget that they cannot disprove the metaphysical, and so behave as if their well-developed predictions are indeed Truth. This attitude in turn forces those who wish to believe in an alternate Truth to attempt to “prove” their metaphysical explanations. Just as a scientist should not confuse belief in the actuality of a theory with the Truth of a theory, so, too, should those who have faith in a metaphysical explanation fall into the trap of needing to “prove” the unprovable. Faith, after all, is believing what common sense tells us not to; the two are not mutually incompatible, and it is sad that Faith and Science insist upon seeing each other as mutually incompatible opponents in the struggle for Truth.
I’m not saying it’s fact in an absolute sense, I’m saying that sometimes the theories are so reliable that they may be treated for practical purposes as though they were fact. We do that all the time. When we use antibiotics to treat infections, when we fly airplanes when we bounce a basketball, we are making practical assumptions that “theories” are facts. Working biologists assume evolution as a given, they don’t treat it as though the “jury is still out,” (to quote GWB).
I think that’s fair. Personally, I think ID is a dishonest attempt to sneak creationism into schools, and I think creationism is antithetical to science and shouldn’t come anywhere near the curriculum, unless it’s in a section on what science is and is used to explain why ID isn’t science.
But to me, Palin is equivocal enough on it that it strikes me that she’s just not going to make this an issue. She’s trying to straddle a fence that will keep her Republican supporters from hating her, while not actually supporting them. It’s also the kind of thing someone would say who vaguely believes in some kind of creation myth, but feels they’re not qualified to really issue strong pronouncements one way or the other. I know a lot of Christians like that, and they’re not typically the ones who are trying to push their creationism on others.
By this, it’s not a fact that your car is blue. Maybe a trickster god is confounding your senses whenever you look at your car to make you and everyone else think it’s blue, when actually it’s pink. Pink and shaped like a large dildo. He’s totally laughing at you, you know.
In fact, you don’t know anything. You could be in a big illusion. You could be a computer-generated character in a simulation which was started ten minutes ago, with fake memories pre-configured. You could be a figment of the Red King’s dream. You don’t know any of these aren’t true; - you don’t know anything.
You’re throwing out the baby with the bathwater. If you have the ability to know anything, then the evidence to back up established science such as evolution is knowable to. If you can know that there’s such a place as Zimbabwe, you can know that evolution accurately describes the development of life as we know it. Probably more easily and with more certainty, even.
Really?!- Even in my more Creationist-days, I’d concede that about the “reptilian brain”. (I just saw it as part of the Creator using the same framework & building on it.) So what’s the difference from a true reptilian brain?
Really. The whole “reptile brain” thing is a hold-over from “evolutionary ladder”-type thinking, wherein it was commonly believed that mammals evolved from reptiles (which thinking also gave rise to the inaccurate phrase “mammal-like reptile”). In actuality, mammals and reptiles evolved from a common ancestor (or more accurately, synapisds - the line that eventually led to mammals, and sauropsids - the line that eventually gave rise to reptiles, evolved from a common ancestor), which was neither reptile nor mammal.
So, what we do have is a primitive (in the phylogenetic sense of “less derived”) brain-stem, which is a character common to pretty much all amniotes. But it is no longer correct to say that said brain structure is a “reptilian brain” in any sense. We mammals “built on” this amniote brain, and so did the reptiles (though differently, and not so much).
I need clarification about what this means to you. If you leave home in the morning and your cat has a full dish of cat food, and when you get home from work the catfood is gone and your cat doesn’t seem hungry, do you come up with many theories about where the catfood went?
If you visit an historical monument that has a plaque next to it saying the monument was built in 1941, but you werent’ born in 1941 and didn’t see it happen, do you have a lot of theories about when the monument was actually built?
If you send an email to a friend and the friend sends an answer but doesn’t directly quote your original email, do you have a lot of theories about your friend having ESP?