Letters to the Editor
droogoy
Published Letters: 589 Editor's Choice: 9
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Not really
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Absolut carnage wrote:
And finally, science too is a faith in that it operates under the assumption that the cosmos is orderly, and that its order can be perceived and even understood
Actually, science doesn't operate under that assumption at all. From the recent balloon-born measurements of Boomerang etc. we now know that the cosmos has a vast "dark energy" component of nearly 73% and 22% dark matter, NEITHER of which can be assessed for "order".
Indeed, the notion of an "ordered" cosmos pretty well went out with the emrgence of the modern quantum theory and its indeteministic basis. When discrete atoms - modeled after a detemrinistic miniature solar system - were replaced with probability waves.
The viewpoint of modern physics in particular, is totally opposed to pre-existent or manifest order. This opposition has arisen not merely from logical arguments, but from experiments and observations in quantum mechanics, statistical mechanics and cosmology. In the light of these advances, the deficiencies in the order paradigm proponents' arguments are now evident.
Both physicists and biologists, for example, now recognize many systems in which order and complex activity can emerge spontaneously out of chaos. (See Ilya Prigogene's book Order Out of Chaso) This recognition leads the dispassionate observer to dispense with any notion of "hidden design" that transcends what empirical science can explain.
A biological example, based on in-vitro experimental studies of cancer tumors, is the individual tumor cell. The cell appears as a fluctuation, able to develop by replication. A cosmological example is the instantaneous formation of the universe by a possible quantum fluctuation. In his definitive paper, Universe Before Planck Time - A Quantum Gravity Model, in Physical Review D, Vol. 28, No. 4, p. 756, T. Padmanabhan shows how this can be done by treating conformal space-time as a quantum variable in de Sitter 4-space.
For those of us who grok it, therefore, the concept of acausal determinism along with the language of mathematics to describe it for the onset of the cosmos - is all we need. Just because 99.99% don't buy or comprehend it, doesn't mean we're going to 'pack it in' and buy into the childhood fable version of the cosmos' origin, predicated on an outdated causality. Although it definitely has some mythological appeal!
In terms of "understanding" that more or less went out with modern quantum mechanics, wherein the mathematics used- and what it disclosed (via highly techical operations such as obtaining "eignenvalues" and "expectation values") - led to an operationalist approach (some have called it a return of logical positivism) that replaced the search for "understanding" with the actual mathematical results.
As Feynmann once wryly observed, if you seek some deep "understanding" in QM you will more likely find yourself deep in a "rabbit hole" from which you may never emerge.
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WRONG! Creationism is no "theory"!
[Read the article: The atheist delusion]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Anonymous wrote:
If teaching creationism in schools is offensive to you, then don't teach that OR evolution. If you teach one, teach the other...and everything is fair.
To this day, I do NOT see what the problem is here. Each is a theory to the other so either teach them both as theories or don't teach either of them.
In fact, creationism is not a bona fide theory like evolution at all. A theory first of all has already made predictions that have been confirmed. In addition, it provides tests for its own falsification, see e.g.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/section4.html
Excerpt:
"Humans and chimpanzees have the exact same cytochrome c protein sequence. The "null hypothesis" given above is false. In the absence of common descent, the chance of this occurrence is conservatively less than 10-93 (1 out of 1093). Thus, the high degree of similarity in these proteins is a spectacular corroboration of the theory of common descent. Furthermore, human and chimpanzee cytochrome c proteins differ by ~10 amino acids from all other mammals. The chance of this occurring in the absence of a hereditary mechanism is less than 10-29. The yeast Candida krusei is one of the most distantly related eukaryotic organisms from humans. Candida has 51 amino acid differences from the human sequence. A conservative estimate of this probability is less than 10-25. "
Neither crude creationism or ID has, up to now, presented tests for falsification. Until they do, they are not doing any science- but promoting religion, or maybe some science -window dressed form of theology.
Falsification is where it's at. REAL science, biology, physics has it- pseudo-science does not, all "presuppositions" nothwithstanding. The evolutionist has gone on record with his falsfiication tests and "stuck his neck out'.
Because of those, and the rendering of the tests by actual researchers - we have recently found the bifurcation from a common ancestor to human was much more rapid than earlier believed. This is the outcome from a TEST - not a speculaiton.
If creationism is real science, then - WHERE are its falsification tests or criteria? What test or observation can I make that will show unequivocally it is wrong?
So, enough of this nonsense that creationism is on some scientific par with evolution. It isn't. It is pure unadulterated garbage and as we know "garbage in, garbage out".
You teach (or co-teach) that crap, and all you can expect is a generation of ignorant, scientifically illiterate and ass backward people - who will more than likely end up shining the shoes of Japanese and Chinese legions that will end up buying off, and owning this pathetic country.
When they aren't on bended knee, praying of course!