State Establishment of Religion

They clearly show evolution to everyone who insists on seeing evolution.

 

You are correct if this is not done scientifically. In science you make predictions and test them with observations that we make in the fossil record that can falsify or verify the predictions. As long as we are doing this in a falsifiable way, its difficult to trick ourselves.

 

My problem is not so much with the science but how some groups ,mostly on the political left, use evolution to say there is no God therefore feel justfied in pushing their agendas promoting immoral behaviors as normal and good. Which is a violation of the first ammendment in my opinion.

 

People are free to use science to argue for whatever ideas that they want. I have heard some interesting arguments using evolution for atheism, for God, or capitalism. You can use evolution for a lot of different things. Rather than blaming the science of evolution, look at these arguments with a critical eye. Does evolution actually prove atheism? You should be focusing on that. Most people have concluded it doesn't prove atheism since most evolutionists are Christian and most Christians are evolutionists.

 

A lot to some is a little to others, but I get your point. I never said nor implied that evolution doesn't happen. However their is a dearth of evidence that humanoids evolved from ape-like creatures, let alone rodents, fish, and amoebae.

The encyclopedia is wrong. I didn't say a scientific hypothesis can be any idle thought, but as you say has to be supported with crafted experimentation, observation, and, I add, analysis. It does not need to be falsifiable and testable to be a solid hypothesis. There is no way the flying pink unicorn idea can be tested or falsified, but neither has there been extensive study and analysis to make it a scientific hypothesis.

That's common sense. There has been extensive analysis and observation on a God created and designed world. Hawking spent tons of time and thought on the genesis and progression of the universe -- probably as much as any other physicist -- and concluded that the God hypothesis is valid because it is reasonably possible given all of the scientific analysis. However, he would not give any probability of its likelihood, any more than he would do that for the other scenarios -- though, which if pressed, might say the others could be more likely.

That is a decent point. I would not recommend a God created universe be taught in most science classes mostly for the reason you state. I wouldn't teach it in a high school philosophy or comparative religion class either. (Especially in any comparative religion class since the God created universe that I am talking about is not religion.) In a Cosmology class it definitely belongs.

 

There is quite a bit of fossil evidence for human evolution. In fact it is our most complete set of transitional fossils. Just peruse through these links and you can see a ton of fossils.
http://humanorigins.si.edu/evidence/human-fossils/fossils
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/homs/specimen.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_human_evolution_fossils

You say that a scientific hypothesis requires support from experimentation, observation, and analysis. I agree. Then you say it doesn't need to be testable. The experimentation, observation, and analysis is how we test hypotheses, they are linked. If there is no need for a hypothesis to be testable, then there is no need for the experimentation, observation, and analysis.

Below are sources that all say that a hypothesis must be testable and falsifiable. Just look for the words "testable" and "falsifiable" and you will quickly and easily see they all support what I am saying. They are from a variety of sources, some geared toward the general public, while others are for academics and scientists.
https://www.britannica.com/science/scientific-hypothesis
https://www.ck12.org/chemistry/hypothesis/lesson/Hypothesis-MS-PS/
http://projects.ncsu.edu/project/bio183de/Black/science/science_scripts.html
http://www.batesville.k12.in.us/physics/PhyNet/AboutScience/Hypotheses.html
https://www.livescience.com/21490-what-is-a-scientific-hypothesis-definition-of-hypothesis.html
https://www.citsci.org/CitSciBlog/829/Writing Hypotheses

Hawking believed that a God wasn't even possible (I disagree with him). Hawking was a strong hardcore atheist. So how did he conclude the God hypothesis was valid?

"We have finally found something that doesn’t have a cause, because there was no time for a cause to exist in. For me this means that there is no possibility of a creator, because there is no time for a creator to have existed in."
-Stephen Hawking
https://www.livescience.com/63854-stephen-hawking-says-no-god.html

A cosmology class is a science class, and should only teach verified scientific laws and theories, not speculation, and not unverified hypothesis. If we should teach God in a cosmology class, and we want to call it a scientific hypothesis, then I demand my transformers mothercube theory be taught in cosmology classes as a scientific hypothesis too. I also want the transformers all-spark taught as well.

The design argument and idea of a creator belongs in a philosophy course. I took a college level philosophy course and the God hypothesis was taught there along-side other discussions about God's existence. It fit in perfectly and gave me a new philosophical perspective on this topic.

 

I never asserted otherwise. But all of your references show evolution within humanoids. There is no fossil evidence that confirms amoebae to fish to rodent to ape to human evolution.

"Testable" in the common scientific vernacular means reproducible, not just looking at and studying.

Hawking's most popular book, A Brief History of Time" is replete with references to a God created and designed universe. There is nothing odd nor dichotomous about an atheist scientist objectively studying cosmology concluding that such a beginning is entirely plausible.

But not the so-called Bing Bang hypothesis, I presume? What else do you suggest be taught in cosmology about the beginning and the evolution of the universe? There is nothing that can be taught about that because nothing meets your criteria -- not the Big Bang, God, no beginning at all, super inflation, string theory, particle/anti-particle quantum creation and destruction, etc.

 

The fossils I showed shows ape to human evolution, and we do have transitional fossils for invertebrates to fish, fish to amphibians, amphibians to mammals.

While we don't have a detailed fossil record everywhere, we do have a general ordering as well. At the bottom we have simple sea creatures, above are more complex sea creatures (cambrian explosion), next we see invertebrate to fish transitionals, next we see fish, next we see transitional fossils between fish and amphibians, next we see amphibians, we see small reptiles, next we see larger reptiles and transitional fossils between reptiles and mammals, next we see dinosaurs and small mammals, next we see the dinosaur fossils disappear and larger mammals, next we see similians, next we see monkeys, next we see apes, next we see ape-humans transitionals, and at the very top we see human.
http://www.fossilmuseum.net/Evolution/transitionalfossils.htm
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_forms
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/faq-transitional.html

Reproducability is part of being testable because the tests need to be reproducable. For example, if I predicted that human evolved from apes and support it with fossils, I need to be able to show the fossils on request.

“God is the name people give to the reason we are here,” he said. “But I think that reason is the laws of physics rather than someone with whom one can have a personal relationship. An impersonal God.”

“Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation,” he said. “What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn’t. I’m an atheist.”
https://time.com/5199149/stephen-hawking-death-god-atheist/

"There is no God," wrote Hawking, as reported by CNN. "No one directs the universe."

"The question is, is the way the universe began chosen by God for reasons we can’t understand, or was it determined by a law of science? I believe the second," wrote Hawking. "If you like, you can call the laws of science 'God', but it wouldn’t be a personal God that you would meet and put questions to."
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news...awking-his-beliefs-god-and-heaven/1668456002/

"One could define God as the embodiment of the laws of nature. However, this is not what most people would think of as God. They mean a human-like being, with whom one can have a personal relationship. When you look at the vast size of the universe, and how insignificant and accidental human life is in it, that seems most implausible.

I use the word “God” in an impersonal sense, like Einstein did, for the laws of nature, so knowing the mind of God is knowing the laws of nature. My prediction is that we will know the mind of God by the end of this century."
https://www.brainpickings.org/2019/07/17/stephen-hawking-brief-answers-to-the-big-questions/

The Big Bang Theory is a theory and not a hypothesis. There is a lot of evidence for the theory. If scientists didn't think there was any evidence for the big bang, then it wouldn't be taught as science. To knowingly teach something unproven as science would be very dishonest.
http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/astronomy/bigbang.html

 

A complete strawman. Neither Hawking nor I claimed the universe plausibly could have been designed by a personal god such as God, Allah, Buddha, et al. Neither did Einstein. I explicitly asserted that I was not talking about such a god. Neither was Hawking when in his own written words (CNN????), as I said, cited god many times as a feasible creator.

BTW, where did the laws of physics come from? Is the fine structure constant, for instance, just a random number that simply appeared out of an energy field like a new quantum particle? If random, why only the precise number that would be viable? Why 7.297 x 10E-3 and not 9.653 x 10E-4?

Theories follow hypotheses.

 

If what you and I mean by God are the processes and forces that made the universe, then I believe in God too. If by God you mean a person with intelligence, then I don't believe in God.

I googled it, but couldn't find a good answer to that question. Hopefully humanity will know the answer one day.

Hypotheses become theories. The Big Bang is a theory that used to be a hypothesis.

 

Indeed. And of course there is no chain of fossil evidence, and DNA testing does not find the highly improbable series of beneficial mutations necessary to 'evolve' certain body parts that obviously do not 'evolve over time'. I bolded mutations because it gets erroneously conflated with adaptations in most of those bogus handwaves invented to sell 'evolution' to school kids who don't know any better.

they should avoid lying to school children at all, and quit presenting 'evolution' as 'facts', and then after such blatant lying expect them to understand what empiricism is and the morality involved in objective science as opposed to political agendas like 'evolution'. If they are going to teach 'evolution' then yes, they need to also include some of the better intelligent design theories as well, and several of Thomas Aquina's chapters from the Summa Theologica on biology as well.

 

One of my favorite passages on Stephen Jay Gould's ludicrous 'Punctuated Equilibrium' handwave:

... I guess it is no secret that even John Kenneth Galbraith, still the public's idea of a great economist, looks to most serious economists like an intellectual dilettante who lacks the patience for hard thinking. Well, the same is true in evolution. I am not sure how well this is known. I have tried, in preparation for this talk, to read some evolutionary economics, and was particularly curious about what biologists people reference. What I encountered were quite a few references to Stephen Jay Gould, hardly any to other evolutionary theorists. Now it is not very hard to find out, if you spend a little while reading in evolution, that Gould is the John Kenneth Galbraith of his subject. That is, he is a wonderful writer who is beloved by literary intellectuals and lionized by the media because he does not use algebra or difficult jargon. Unfortunately, it appears that he avoids these sins not because he has transcended his colleagues but because he does not seem to understand what they have to say; and his own descriptions of what the field is about - not just the answers, but even the questions - are consistently misleading. His impressive literary and historical erudition makes his work seem profound to most readers, but informed readers eventually conclude that there's no there there. (And yes, there is some resentment of his fame: in the field the unjustly famous theory of "punctuated equilibrium", in which Gould and Niles Eldredge asserted that evolution proceeds not steadily but in short bursts of rapid change, is known as "evolution by jerks").

Paul Krugman, "What Economists Can Learn From Evolutionary Theorists"

 

This is false.

Science is fully open to any other scientific explanation. And, if such were found, the reward from science would be large in both fame and fortune.

Beyond that, science can't test for god. So, demanding that science find god is clear nonsense.

 

Evolution is a series of adaptations.

And, those adaptations DO involve mutations.

Your idea about the fossil record is sort of backward. We have in infinitesimal percent of the life forms that have existed. It would be CRAZY to suggest that it's even slightly interesting that we don't have a year by year or decade by decade or century by century collection of the remains of any species.

What we DO have is a theory that is tested every time we find a fossil. If that fossil doesn't propertly fit within what evolution predicts, it would be a refutation of the theory. But, that has not happened, even as millions of fossils are found and as our capability of detecting diffrences (by examining genetic material, morphology, dating, etc.) improves.

Intelligent design and your other proposals are purely religion. They have no place in modern science, as science doesn't address religion in any way.

We CAN address religion in philosophy classes.

Do you study science in bible school? I hope not.

 

And as a real scientist will tell you, beneficial mutations are extreme rarities, which makes the probabilities even more unlikely, in fact it makes such a series 'magical'.

Obviously I studied real science and reason, while you just learned to parrot nonsense, since that's easier and a lot less work than studying.

 

This is one aspect of evolution theory that I have often questioned but is seldom discussed. That is, by far most mutations would be negative in improving adaptability.

 

We can watch evolution in progress. Bacteria are defeating our antibiotics. Viruses such as COVID, MERs, flu, etc. overcome our ability to resist - requiring new vaccines every year. Our fruits and vegetables have all been brought to us by evolution, with humans providing the selection of the fittest. Humans turned wolves into dogs that fit in a purse using evolution. Over the last 20,000 years humans acquired the ability to digest milk as adults, blue eyes, and we lost brain mass about the size of a tennis ball. Scientists study evolutionary mechanisms in plants and animals, showing mulitple contributors to evolution at the cellular level.

?? You do'n't have to "study" to see evolution in progress.

 

[QUOTE="WillReadmore, post: 1071566666, member: 64140" ] Our fruits and vegetables have all been brought to us by evolution, with humans providing the selection of the fittest. Humans turned wolves into dogs that fit in a purse using evolution. .[/QUOTE]

Yes, like most of your 'experiments' claiming to prove 'evolution', they actually only prove 'intelligent design'. See, when some grad student throws together various concoctions, and they then proceed to do what we already know they will do, that isn't a random act of nature, it's deliberate planning. Of course this is lost on you, since you have already decided you want to be in a club, get to learn secret handshakes, all that stuff that goes with being a part of the herd.

lol @'bacteria n Stuff!!!' Let us know when an eyeball or a liver or something spontaneously erupts out of nowhere, then we'll talk.

 

'Evolution' has huge holes in it as a theory, and it certainly isn't 'fact' at this point; most of the peddling of it is purely political in nature, and nothing to do with 'science'. They would also run around claiming 'Da Evil Xians' believed in flat Earth myths and the like a well as other silly claims. Even their Hero had t admonish his fans over their ignorant rantings and attacks. This was a product of 'The Enlightenment' and all the anti-Catholic propaganda since the Reformation being cited as 'facts' by supposedly educated men, few of whom had actually read Darwin's papers or understood what he was saying to begin with, but it was fashionable to bash Xians anyway, and like their ignorant ancestors we still see the same sort of ignorance and political agendas in all of these modern threads on the topic.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_flat_Earth

In Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians, Jeffrey Russell describes the Flat Earth theory as a fable used to impugn pre-modern civilization and creationism.[10][2][3]

James Hannam wrote:

The myth that people in the Middle Ages thought the Earth is flat appears to date from the 17th century as part of the campaign by Protestants against Catholic teaching. But it gained currency in the 19th century, thanks to inaccurate histories such as John William Draper's History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (1874) and Andrew Dickson White's A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (1896). Atheists and agnostics championed the conflict thesis for their own purposes, but historical research gradually demonstrated that Draper and White had propagated more fantasy than fact in their efforts to prove that science and religion are locked in eternal conflict.[12]

... so much for the alleged 'objectivity' of the 'rationalists' and their fads. It's like they and the entire education system is stuck in some time warp in The Stupid Zone, and Scotty can't beam them back.

 

..hardly..
..this is the premise of this thread, that HUMAN BEINGS have hijacked True Science, and turned it into a pseudoscience religion.
Instead of open inquiry, mandated conformity. Instead of possibility, narrow minded opinions. Instead of classical science, progressive pseudoscience.

Look at how Progresso World has twisted and distorted actual scientific methodology to conform to the tenets of belief, for the progressive religion:

1. Mandated belief in global warming, even though the evidence is sketchy at best, and contrived or falsified at worst.
2. Mandated belief in Universal Common Ancestry, even though there is NO EVIDENCE that this imaginary belief can or did happen.
3. Ignore scientific conclusions about a pandemic, in the early stages, and suggest a 'Hug a Chinaman!' day, to mock and ridicule political enemies.
4. Censor and demean ANY competing worldviews, such as Christianity, as 'Religious!!' , even though the beliefs in Progressivism are equally religious.
5. Hijack EVERY HUMAN INSTITUTION, to comply with the progressive agenda. Censor, attack, caricaturize, and ridicule any departures from the Official State Mandated Beliefs.
6. Mandate the belief in abiogenesis, the big bang, and other pseudoscience imaginations as 'Settled Science!', when they are unevidenced beliefs, with no hard data.
7. Demonize skepticism, critical thinking, and questioning authority, with the mandated conformity to 'Trust the Experts!' ..when these 'experts' have an agenda, conflicts of interest, and are equally indoctrinated into the same religious belief system.

I will clarify: This is NOT 'science', that these pseudoscience pretenders pitch. It is a religious belief, shrouded in pseudoscientific terms, to deceive the gullible...and the gullible have been deceived. They nod like bobbleheads at the progressive talking points and parrot their Indoctrination, but react with knee jerk hostility and outrage if anyone dares to question their sacred beliefs. They become jihadists, attacking the blasphemers of the pseudoscience religion of atheistic naturalism.

The objective reality in the dichotomy of origins is:
there was either godless naturalism, with no intelligent Cause, or there was an Intelligent Designer, that Caused all things.

No amount of pseudoscience babbling can change those as the logical possibilities for our origins.

To pretend atheistic naturalism is 'Science!! , but creationism is 'Religion!! , is nothing but state sponsored religious bigotry.

Hence, this thread..

 

This is not correct. And I am talking about scientists themselves not all the non-scientists who turn science into a religion as usfan describes. There are these two laws of science (and other things): 1. the law of independent herds, and 2. the law of expected results. Albeit not deliberate or even conscious, most scientists succumb to these laws and tend to reject differing explanation.

 

The fact that it is sometimes pushed by some with religious fervor not withstanding, the hypothesis of intelligent design of the universe is not religion. It has no worship, tenants, or cult assigning, for example.

 

Bingo. But of course as we see many so-called 'rationalists' can't deal with anything outside that little box, as there is nobody to tell them what to respond with, it screws up their programming. If they had truly studied science and empiricism and the logic and morality behind them, they wouldn't be droning out the same rubbish over and over and over again, and expecting different results. It's also ironic that they bash the very source of western secular thought and foundations of our universities with such rubbish, but there they are.


“….how did the dominance of Christianity affect the knowledge of, and attitudes towards nature? The standard answer, developed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and widely propagated in the twentieth, maintains that Christianity presented serious obstacles to the advancement of science and, indeed, sent the scientific enterprise into a tailspin from which it did not recover for more than a thousand years. The truth, as we shall see, is far different and much more complicated.

One charge frequently leveled against the Church is that it was broadly anti-intellectual – that the leaders of the church preferred faith to reason and ignorance to education. In fact, this is a considerable distortion…Christians quickly recognized that if the Bible was to be read, literacy would have to be encouraged; and in the long run Christianity became the major patron of European education and a major borrower from the Classical intellectual tradition. Naturally enough, the kind and level of education and intellectual effort favored by the Church Fathers that which supported the mission of the Church as they perceived it….whether this represents a blow against the scientific enterprise or modest, but welcome, support for it depends largely on the attitudes and expectations that one brings to the question. If we compare the early church with a modern research university or the National Science Foundation, the church will prove to have failed abysmally as a supporter of science and natural philosophy. But such a comparison is obviously unfair. If, instead, we compare the support given to the study of nature by the early church with support available from any other contemporary social institution, it will become clear that the church was one of the major patrons – perhaps the major patron – of scientific learning. Its patronage may have been limited and selective, but limited and selected patronage is better than no patronage at all. But a critic to view the early church as an obstacle to scientific progress might argue that the handmaiden status accorded natural philosophy is inconsistent with the existence of genuine science. True science, this critic would maintain, cannot be the handmaiden of anything, but must process total autonomy; consequently, the “disciplined” science that Augustine sought is no science at all. The appropriate response is that totally autonomous science is an attractive ideal, but we do not live in an ideal world. Many of the most important developments in the history of science have been produced by people committed not to autonomous science, but to science in the service of some ideology, social program, or practical end; for much of its history, the question has not been whether science will function as handmaiden, but which mistress it will serve.”

--David C. Lindberg The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, 600 BC to AD 1450 pg.149-51

 

“The contribution of the religious culture of the early Middle Ages to the scientific movement was thus one of preservation and transmission. The monasteries served as the transmitters of literacy and a thin version of the Classical tradition(including science or natural philosophy) through a period when literacy and scholarship were severely threatened. Without them, Western Europe would not have more science, but less.”

--ibid. pg.157



"It was not the case that the dominance of the lay and clerical aristocracy had a merely negative, inhibiting effect on the field of technology, in some areas it needs and tastes favoured a certain progress. The clergy and above all the monks were obliged to have few contacts as possible with the outside world, including economic relations, and above all they desired to be freed from material tasks to have time for the Opus Dei and for properly spiritual occupations (offices and prayers), and for their work of charity, which obliged them to provide for the economic needs not only of their numerous familia but also for the poor and of wandering beggars by distributing foodstuff. This encouraged them to develop equipment of a certain technical standard. If one is looking for the earliest mills, water mills, or for the progress in farming techniques, one often sees the religious orders in the vanguard. It was not a coincidence if here during the early Middle Ages men attributed the invention of the watermill to a saint who introduced it into a region, for example St. Orens of Auch who had a mill setup at St. Gabriel on the Durancole in the 6th century….As we have seen, the Church encouraged improvements in the measurement of time for the needs of ecclesiastical computation. The building of churches – the first great buildings of the Middle Ages – gave a stimulus to technical progress, not only in building techniques, but also in the tools used, in methods of transportation, and in the auxiliary skills such as glasswork.”

--Jacques Le Goff Medieval Civilization 400-1500 pg. 198

he Sun in the Church by J.L. Heilbron is a provocative work of scholarship that challenges long-held views of the relationship between science and Christianity. Heilbron's main point is simple enough: "The Roman Catholic Church gave more financial and social support to the study of astronomy for over six centuries, from the recovery of ancient learning during the late Middle Ages into the Enlightenment, than any other, and, probably, all other, institutions." Despite the persecution of Galileo, Heilbron notes, the Church actively supported mathematical and astronomical research--often designing cathedrals that could also function as observatories--in order to set the precise date of Easter (a crucial endeavor for maintaining the unity of the Church). Heilbron's fluid, engaging style brings his detailed reconstructions of 16th- and 17th-century Church politics to life. And his argument that scientific knowledge was deemed both morally neutral and politically useful during the Reformation and beyond yields an unusually interesting, complex, and human understanding of Catholicism in the early Modern period. --Michael Joseph Gross



“Taken as a whole, the history of the Middle Ages after the ruin in the West of the ancient civilization is one of progress, progress in society, government, order and organization, laws, the development of human faculties, of rational thought, of knowledge and experience, of art and culture.”
--C.W. Previte-Ortor The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History vol.2 “The 12th Century to the Renaissance”



“The Catholic Church long stood condemned as the enemy of enlightenment, with the alleged suppressions of Copernicus and Galileo as Exhibit A. More recent historians, however, have pointed to evidence of Church attitudes and policies of a quite different coloration. Lynn White asserted that Christian theology actually gave the Middle Ages a fiat for technology: “man shares in great measure God’s transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to paganism and Asia’s religions…not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God’s will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.”
--Frances and Joseph Gies Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages pg. 4-5

 

Very well stated.

While the church's support may have been limited and selective, it was also spotty. Often "Christianity" in the first 1-1/2 centuries or so is wrongly equated to the presumed and decreed omnipotence of the catholic church despite the popes varying considerably on how they ran Christianity. While many strongly and pretty objectively supported scientific study and discovery, others had Galileo arrested and kept Copernicus from releasing his lengthy and extensive analysis of the solar system until just before he died to escape the church's wrath. The Church and Christianity are not necessarily synonymous.