Your town: Los Angeles, CA
Your town: Los Angeles, CA
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Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You
Anyone who can't share gets nothing....It's not a competition, it's an adventure! (Yesterday | post #5129)
Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You
No, you just don't want the competition. *smootch* (Yesterday | post #5128)
Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You
If *evidence* was given for that proposition, then noBut it relies on exactly thew same type of reasoning that is the foundation of that goo-to-you evolution. What you want to do is argue against the conclusions when applied to one realm when they work perfectly well in every situation where they have been appliedAnd religion does *such* a good job of respecting life. That's why the Reformation was so peaceful and serene. That's why the Middle East is an example of peaceful co-existence. That's why scientists have tried to hinder every major advancement made by religious organizations from vaccination, to birth control, to stem cell research.</sarc asm> (Friday | post #5091)
Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You
You seem to think that the Big Bang is some hair-brained concept that people came up with to avoid the idea of a creator. That is very far from the truth. First of all, the basic theory is the theory of general relativity, which is Einstein's description for gravity as a curvature of spacetime. In this, the curvature is related to the density of matter and energy in a very specific way. This theory of gravity is the best we have at this point and has passed all experimental tests with flying colors. When GR was applied to the universe as a whole, and assuming a universe that 'looks the same' at all points, it was found that 'space' would either expand over time or contract over time. In the first case, there was a time before which GR simply doesn't apply. In the latter case, that time is in the future and you can't talk about a time past that. The original version of the Big Bang model (which is just GR applied to the universe as a whole) was proposed by a Catholic priest. When the Pope at the time started claiming that it proved Genesis correct, LeMaitre (the priest) told him to stop because it could be interpreted many ways. Later, thermodynamics was brought into the description with the realization that the expansion causes a cooling. If this is run backwards, it is found that the universe was much hotter in the past. Using our knowledge of nuclear physics, we could use the hot Big Bang model to predict the amounts of hydrogen, deuterium, helium, and lithium that we should see today. These abundances have been verified. Next, the hot Big Bang also predicted a 'afterglow' that would be seen in all directions and be of a very specific form (a Planck distribution). This background radiation has been found and currently is what gives us some of our best information about the early universeAnd I think most religious cosmologists believe something along these lines. The question is not whether it is a possibility. The question is whether there is any actual evidence that this is, in fact, the case. It really is quite easy to spin a variety of stories about how the universe came to be. Some even are consistent with what we know about the laws of physics. But the proposal that there is no mechanism that can be described automatically takes your proposal out of the realm of scienceYou are assuming that there *was* a 'pre-Big Bang'. In the description given by general relativity, time itself is affected by the density of matter and energy. As you go backwards in time, the curvature increases to the point that there is literally no way to continue time past the instant of the Big Bang. It is analogous, but not identical, to what happens at the north pole of the earth with latitude lines. If I asked you what is north of the north pole, you would say that it is impossible; that the north pole is as far north as you can go. In a similar way, the instant of the Big Bang is as far backwards in time as you can go. There is no cause because there is no previous time. There is no 'something from nothing' because the conservation laws ALL describe comparisons between different TIMES. (Friday | post #5090)
Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You
One of my favorites is not on that site: An international flight runs into some stormy weather. The turbulence is horrific and people are starting to get concerned about the safety of the flight. Suddenly, a man stands up and says he knows what to do: 'Everyone from Eastern Europe, please go sit on that side of the plane, he points.' Well, they do, and instantly, the turbulence stops. Later, the man is asked how he knew what to do. He replied "I'm an applied mathematician. I knew that you can get stability by putting the Poles in the left half-plane." (Friday | post #5009)
Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You
And one that gets away from the vine is a free grape. And one that has only a few ancestors is finitely generated. And don't get me started about normal sub-grapes. And then there was the rather dim one who was a simple grape. Or the one that was contorted: a topological grape. Or the funny one that has some Haar measure. (Friday | post #5000)
Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You
Probably something to do with mole'. (Thursday | post #4907)
Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You
If I claimed that a certain building was designed and built by a certain civilization, the mechanism of that construction is a highly relevant aspect of my proposal. If I said that this civilization just said 'let that building be' and it just was, you would probably want a bit more evidence than my simple assertion. You might even be inclined to ask how they were able to create buildings by fiat in that way, what the mechanism for that was, etc. Same for your designer. (Thursday | post #4906)
Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You
Well, yes, that would definitely fit. OK, Q:What's yellow and equivalent to the Axiom of Choice? A: Zorn's Lemon (Thursday | post #4900)
Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You
I've found an interesting contradiction in the tactics of some IDers. Some, like this video, will go on and on about the fine tuning of the universe and how it is so well designed for life. But then they will turn around and claim that the earth is a very, very special place because it it and the moon and the sun didn't have exactly the characteristics they do then life wouldn't have happened here. If the universe as a whole was THAT well designed for life, it would be common and the earth wouldn't be special. If it takes an intelligent intervener to get life started on earth, then the universe as a whole is NOT fine tuned for life! So, all you IDers, where was the intelligent design? In the universe as a whole, or just on our little planet? Was the whole universe fine tuned so that life could exist (and hence so it would be common)? Or was it so poorly set up that special intervention was required to get life started on earth? How do we tell the difference? Is it a local designer or a global one? Perhaps two different designers with different scales of operation? One made the universe, the other (obviously much smaller) made the earth? (Thursday | post #4899)
Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You
Not ludicrous. Just not supported by the facts. (Thursday | post #4894)
Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You
Only if she was intelligent, sweet, and cute! ;) (Thursday | post #4889)
Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You
And your point is? Let's recap what that little video essentially says: based on what we know now, if the constants of nature were different, we wouldn't be here. OK, fine. What does that show? I'd point out that the degree of 'fine tuning' is hotly debated. For example, the resonance between C12 and 3He4 which allows carbon burning in large stars is one that is often mentioned as one of those examples of tuning. But, we don't know the details of how that resonance depends on the basic constants. As mentioned by Weinberg, the fineness of the tuning isn't really all that great in relative terms. So what, if any, conclusions do we draw from it? Yes, if the strong force were a bit weaker, nobody would be having this conversation. But is it even possible for the strong force to have a different strength? The same basic question goes for the weak and the electromagnetic forces also. Ultimately, we don't know. We have never seen these forces acting other than they do. We don't even have decent hypotheses on how the values *could* change. There are some proposals where, in an infinite universe, ALL possible combinations of values are seen somewhere. If that is the case, then we will, by necessity, be in an area where the constants have values allowing for life. But truthfully, these hypotheses aren't taken very seriously because there is simply no way to test them. So they are discussed around the water coolers as cute toys. Until there is some type of understanding of how and whether the fundamental constants can vary, to make an argument from design is at best premature. (Thursday | post #4888)
Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You
Not quite sure I get the joke in that, but I had a chance to meet Irving Kaplansky at University of Chicago one summer. Amazingly funny guy. (Thursday | post #4886)
Intelligent Design: Coming To A State Legislature Near You
My favorite is to just push things up a dimension or two from Calc III. It isn't too difficult to get them to imagine cross sections of a 3-sphere or to get the general idea of I^4. Trying to go up one MORE dimension tends to lose them, though. <smile> (Thursday | post #4884)
