Ad blocker detected: Our website is made possible by displaying online advertisements to our visitors. Please consider supporting us by disabling your ad blocker on our website.
Discussion room for teachers in Cambodia and beyond. The place to exchange your ideas and views on TEFLs, schools, salaries and the working world. Non-teachers welcome.
Ant. wrote: in fact most all of religion has NO FACTS to go and check, it is entirely faith.
ant, I agree with some of what you wrote re science, but are you serious? Even an outcast such as myself knows that many things/events in the Bible, Quran, Writings of Buddha etc. 'check out', at least can be historically proven, and I would hazard aguess that teh same applies to the other major religions such as Hinduism etc.
andy?
>
0
ירי ילדים והפצצת אזרחים דורש אומץ, כמו גם הטרדה מינית של עובדי ההוראה.
Indeed, I'm sure many of the stories related in the religious books are based on real events.
But is that religion?
What evidence is there that the world was created in 7 days?
What evidence is there supporting Intelligent Design, as opposed to just picking holes in Evolution?
What evidence is there in support of the existence of God?
It may well be that all of science and our observations are a mirage, that religion is right, we're all just wisps of God's mind.
But unless it is observable, testable, science can't go there. There are no facts, it is entirely down to faith.
"The way science works is by observation, and then fitting all the observations together into a logically consistent story.
A "theory".
Which has to be consistent with the observations, and has to be testable.
It is not just an idea pulled out of the air, that would be a conjecture."
You really didn't have to hand me ammunition, there is plenty out there for those who bother to look.
When you've observed and recorded evolution you'll be very famous and probably win a Nobel for something, then you won't have to work anymore.
But, as you say, "But unless it is observable, testable, science can't go there. There are no facts, it is entirely down to faith." So stick with the real sciences and leave out the fiction stuff.
A "theory".
Which has to be consistent with the observations, and has to be testable.
um, that would be testable with your brain, not just with eyes or hands, testable doesn't necessarily mean "directly observable".
Really, as I said, what do you mean by "verify"?
If you observe that A is the same weight as B, and B is the same weight as C, do you think you can safely say that A is the same weight as C, or do you think that requires a leap of "faith", and you would have to weigh them yourself? Would you have more faith if someone wrote down in a big book that A is the same as C?
Ant, you ask "What evidence is there that the world was created in 7 days?"
A good question, but a flawed one.
The Hebrew word used in the old testament is 'yom' which literally means period of time. The translators of the King James version used day. However, they could just have easily used 'period of time'. So it is quite likely erroneous to think of it only being 7 literal days.
From Strong's Exhaustive Concordance, yom =
day by day, time
(Aramaic) corresponding to yowm; a day -- day (by day), time.
As for your other two questions (which are tangential to the thread), with all due respect, do your own research or you will keep dismissing others based on ignorance. Not a very defensible position.
Well OK, so the story is a little vague.
The order of creation is also inconsistent within the bible, and there is observable evidence that both are wrong.
is the good book inaccurate then?
Well hey, so is science.
They must be equally valid, right?
But that's not the point, it's not a case that the bible is true unless proved false.
The point for creationists, and many religions, is whether there exists an intelligent creator entity.
Maybe there is, but there is no evidence, not a single observable, testable fact, in support of that idea, it is entirely down to faith.
>
0
Last edited by Ant. on Fri Jul 20, 2012 5:43 pm, edited 1 time in total.
They both have about as many holes as Swiss cheese.
Science proves itself wrong every other day now.
Again, science still has more questions than answers about the universe. They are just as guilty as the creationists; they both love to yell "FACT!" when they really don't know.
Anything u read in science "books" is almost ancient compared to current science journals. That's how fast science is changing.
You're falling into the same fallacy as so many others do, not understanding the basic premise of science and what a "theory" and what "assumptions" are. In fact, you yourself have stated what is quite a critical distinction between science and faith - "Science proves itself wrong every other day now." It is in the very nature of science to both question and attempt to answer all the questions about the universe. That science is advancing so rapidly is indeed the proof of how much we don't know and how quickly we're getting to grips with many of the fundamental truths of the universe and our reality. Postulating, proving and disproving hypotheses is what science does. That anyone's ideas are rigorously tested and if shown to have any errors or questions they are exposed publicly is one of its biggest strengths. This is why the conspiracy theorists are wrong - anyone can disprove anyone else's hypothesis, and nobody's hypothesis is accepted unless it is fully reviewed by the scientist's peers and the experimental results are repeated in similar conditions by other people. This is a strength of science, not a weakness.
I know what "theories" are, no need to teach me the basics.
LoL, if science was conducted correctly in the first place, it would never be proven wrong, there would just be more "blanks" in the equation to figure out in the first place. All you science buffs forget that if u were born a couple hundred years ago you'd all be swearing by statements that scientists (or anyone, really) would laugh if they heard u say it! When is the last time YOU PERSONALLY picked up a microscope and checked out ANY of this? If scientists say they find the hibs boson particle, are you going to go see it for yourself, or just email the picture you find of it on Google to all your friends and say, "see, I told u so!"
My point is YOU and, I assume, all of us reading this just have faith in all this stuff. You don't verify Jack shit yourself. U probably have a library at home that explains all sorts of crazy "theories" on the sub-atomic level and you haven't verified a SINGLE ONE yourself! Ha! That's funny to me!
cambod wrote:(And for the record, I believe in some sort of intelligent design. Even the smallest single celled organism seems too complex to randomly happen without a higher power making it, even after zillions of zillions of years. And no, I'm not Christian or anything else. Once science, with all their understanding and high-tech equipment, can create ANY sort of life under any circumstances of their choice, then I'll consider the possibility that this all just "randomly" happened.)
This is another common fallacy, that if evolution is true, then scientists should be able to duplicate it in a lab. In fact, they already have demonstrated evolution of species in a lab by showing how different bacteria can evolve different characteristics over the course of thousands of generations of bacteria exposed to different changes in their environment that were designed to encourage such a change. And of course there have been many new species of organisms created in science labs, usually unfortunately in order to create new ways to kill our "enemies". Of course, they're not synthesizing these organisms from scratch. Similar to the transitional gap argument, as soon as a scientist does manage to create an amino acid in lab conditions from nothing, the standard will simply be raised to "create a person in the lab from nothing".
Again, this micro-evolution you speak of is NOT the same as the beginning of live on Earth. Of course I believe in that. No need to reply to that, honestly.
If life just happened randomly, why is it so difficult for our expert scientists to create even something simple from "scratch"? My guess (chill out, only a guess) is that they will NEVER be able to do it. They will only be able to "evolve/alter/change" things that are already living. Only a superior being could do this, and never by chance.
cambod wrote:Also, "science" can't verify half the stuff they come up with.
Carbon dating? Until they have a rock they have been monitoring for billions of years, I think there is room for HUGE errors.
They say they "know" the composition of Earth? They can't verify anything less than a few kilometers deep.
Mapping the distance of stars billions of light years away without being able to confirm a single one of them? All just theories that they can't verify.
Again, they could very well be right about many of these things, but it still requires a lot of faith until ANY of these things can actually be verified in the same units they are using.
Don't give up your day job.
The whole BASIS of science is verifying hypotheses. Carbon dating is widely accepted and has been verified countless times. Check out this video (I won't embed it). What you're REALLY saying is "I don't understand science, and because what I've had explained to me sounds ridiculously complicated and beyond my world framework of understanding, I choose to not believe it.
Carbon dating is SUPER simple to understand. Don't think for one minute that myself and others that believe in some sort of design to our planet and the life form on it are scientifically retarded because of that reasoning. I'm just saying that rocks they say are 2 billion years old cannot be verified. Period. (Welk, in 2 billion years from now then yes, we can finally verify our results from TODAY) They have no idea at what rate carbon decays after/before a million years BECAUSE THEY HAVE NEVER VERIFIED IT AT THAT TIME. They just assume they have made sound calculations and go with it. We truly only verify the carbon dating process of things we have actually had the time to observe. Anything else is just educated speculation.
Speaking of day jobs, let's talk about the job of creating GPS maps of planet Earth If someone showed me a map, it might or might not be accurate. Either way, I MYSELF could go and check out the real land there. If it was a GPS map of a star 2 million light years away, we could all discuss it until we're blue in the face, but wouldn't be able to verify it one way or the other.
cambod wrote:It is kind of like thinking, "If 8 hours of sleep is good for u, then 16 would be even better, and 32 must be even better than that!" That might sound like a good theory if we weren't able to actually TRY sleeping more than 8 hours (because of time restrictions, or whatever.) But, 16 hours is not a lot of time for us. We can ACTUALLY try sleeping 16 hours+ and KNOW that theory is bullshit. But, until we actually put it to the test, we wouldn't really know that, and it might have seemed reasonable to assume such nonsense.
The way a hypothesis works is this. You study a subject and understand the principles that have been verified to date through experimentation and analysis. You postulate something that you think would be the case based on these principles and understanding of how things work. You then go and look for it. When you find exactly what you think you were going to find, then you've verified your hypothesis. Then you repeat it to make sure you got it right. Then you send the results to other scientists who review the paper and decide whether its viable. After they question and are satisfied with the answers, you publish the paper in a reputable journal. Other scientists can then review, comment, question, challenge and repeat the experiment if they think they don't believe the data or the results.
You CAN do this with rocks going back into the deep past, and you CAN do this with stellar observations. You don't need to go and see the freakin' star to verify that it exists. Do you think the sun exists, or do you have to get on a space ship and go there to find out? Hell, based on your standard, you'd have had to assume I didn't exist until I was sitting in front of you drinking a beer in Vientiane. That's one way to do it, but hardly a practical one.
Haha, I'm still a little hazy as to whether u exist or not, my creativity can get out of hand sometimes. Again, I agree with you that verifying some of these theories aren't always practical. That's a problem in itself. Still doesn't mean you can just be lazy about verifying things. Again, that just goes back to scientists often just assuming too much. It's mind blowing to think how recently the theory of gravity has changed! It shouldn't have taken a rocket scientist to figure that out, we were more than scientifically capable of figuring that out decades earlier. That's scientist assuming a theory is correct way too hastily. I can only imagine all the wrong crap science has come up with now that will have to be corrected in the future.
cambod wrote:And also, for the record, I consider myself undecided. Once u decide u KNOW the answer to something, u stop looking for facts and start looking for "supporting facts," and that's all u can see.
Wrong again. The whole basis of science and scientists is "prove to me that what you're saying is true, and until a better or more detailed explanation is proven, that will be acceptable and form part of my overall body of knowledge on this subject." They may well think "there are parts of this idea I can accept, but others I don't" as well. They may also think "that's contrary to my understanding/experience/intuition, and in this case they'll likely set out to disprove the theory or find a better one. Science is a very dynamic field that is changing all the time. I would say "evolving", but that takes so long and happens so minutely and incrementally it would be a bad characterization.
An intelligent scientist has more questions than answers. A stupid scientist has more answers than questions.(my lonely opinion)
And please don't forget that the things you think are "CORRECT" now will probably be absolutely hysterical to even think about in 50 years!
Overall, I'm happy with the way science is "evolving", i just wish they'd have more blanks in their equations instead of just filling them with whatever "works" for the time being.
>
0
Last edited by cambod on Fri Jul 20, 2012 5:53 pm, edited 2 times in total.
Ant. wrote: in fact most all of religion has NO FACTS to go and check, it is entirely faith.
ant, I agree with some of what you wrote re science, but are you serious? Even an outcast such as myself knows that many things/events in the Bible, Quran, Writings of Buddha etc. 'check out', at least can be historically proven, and I would hazard aguess that teh same applies to the other major religions such as Hinduism etc.
andy?
I assume he means that whilst claims such as Jeshua bar Joseph lived and gave certain teachings which inspired a movement dedicated to him can be factually verified or falsified, assertions such as he was born of a virgin and is the Son of God cannot be verified by historical or scientific evidence. The former is no big deal - there were a number of wise rabbis giving similar teachings at the time, whereas the latter is the unique 'selling point' (or has been since St. Paul).
Actually, it is much harder to prove any claims at all about early Hinduism and Buddhism - for one, the climate causes evidence to perish quickly, and secondly it was the Greeks who invented the ruminants of modern historicity (with Thucydides' Pelopponnesian War); it's is nigh-on impossible to disentangle dates and fixed historical references from early Hindu/Buddhist mythology. What is distinctive about Buddhism, however, is that its key claims are independent of any historical claims. There are no non-verifiable truth-claims to assent to; rather there is a personally verifiable path to greater peace of mind that is attainable regardless of whether Buddha taught it or not.
matty wrote:Teach the controversy in a political science class. There is no scientific controversy.
And there you have it. All the rest of this is just noise.
Maybe teach it in a sociology class as well, as a case study of how modern education systems fail to equip grown men with the critical thinking skills required to discriminate between fact and fiction.
Cambod, scientists don't carbon date rocks so much, we carbon date the remains of once-living organisms. New dating methods (and carbon dating is 60+ years old) are carefully cross-checked against a range of samples of precisely known age, in order to help ensure their accuracy. I could go on.
Or you could just google Peppered Moths. Creationists hate Peppered Moths, and even mounted a campaign a few years back to discredit scholarship about them. It was unsuccessful. This is the kind of thing that religious nutters are reduced to these days, when they're not compiling lists of creationist "scientists" that no-one has ever heard of.
It's also very important not to imagine that scientific debate over details reflects any kind of broader debate over general theoretical principles. For example, theories of human origins are being overturned all the time, but each refinement or even 'revolution' in our data simply reaffirms well-established tenets of biology like evolution.
Carbon dating? Until they have a rock they have been monitoring for billions of years, I think there is room for HUGE errors.
They say they "know" the composition of Earth? They can't verify anything less than a few kilometers deep.
Oh please, what do you mean by verify? That they see it with their own eyes? And then you would have to trust them. Or you need to see it with YOUR own eyes? Can you trust what you see?
...
I mean verify. Just because your "calculations" work or the same EVERY time, doesn't mean they are correct.
If u say it's a kilometer from here to the hospital, I can ACTUALLY take measurements and verify the WHOLE distance by measuring it. The whole way. But, if u say it's 2 million light years from here to some random star, we can't go there and measure it.....yet... To me (and I feel science should agree) that is unverifiable at this time. Simple as that.
As far as I'm aware it's still a mystery to scientists as to why we ALL age and die. We don't know Jack shit about the universe.....yet....
If science was always this scientific, they wouldn't have to go BACK and change their big stories because the "facts" changed. But they aren't. They assume just as much as most church dwellers.