once more in the "yeah, right, whatever..." category...

[acroyear]

A "Creationist" theme park that exists, "Dinosaur Adventure Land to counter all the science centers and natural history museums that explain the evolution of life with Darwinian theory. There are dinosaur bone replicas, with accompanying explanations that God made dinosaurs on Day 6 of the creation as described in Genesis, 6,000 years ago."

excuse me, but let me actually back my case up with a citation: From gospelcom.net: Search words "dinosaur"

Sorry, we found no verses matching your specifications. Try a different search type, or a different Bible version.

yeah, genesis REALLY says that, doesn't it...

but wait, there's more:

"There are a lot of creationists that are really smart and debate the intellectuals, but the kids are bored after five minutes," said Mr. Hovind, who looks boyish at 51 and talks fast. "You're missing 98 percent of the population if you only go the intellectual route."

uh, maybe because 98 percent of the population simply decide not to use their fucking intellect? Sure seems that's the right percentage of assholes who can't drive out there...

also talks about "creationist" tours like tours of the Grand Canyon ("raft the canyon and learn how Noah's flood contributed to the formation").

uh...yeah, right, whatever...again...

my problem now: I used to think that "home schooling" wasn't necessarilly a bad thing. Until now. the article quotes: "Rachel Painter, camp director at the Alpha Omega Institute, which runs several creationist family summer camps in Colorado, said creationist vacations had gained popularity as the number of Christian home-schooling families had grown."

It seems that home-schooling parents and their students/kids are the #1 customers of these places, which means that home-schooled kids are getting nothing in the way of a legitimate science-based biology curriculum, which is going to be devestating to them in the long run, when they have to face the truth of how things really are.

of this dinosaur park's founder, the NYTimes notes: Escambia County sued him in 2000 after he refused to get a $50 permit before building his theme park, saying the government had no authority over a church.

If that's not a poster-child statement for taxing the churches, then I don't know what the hell is...and dammit, I'm religious and this asshole's making me feel this way...b.t.w., the guy's had major IRS dealings already over the same subject, but the times decided to gloss over the details of it.

"We've been to museums, discovery centers, where you have to sit there and take the evolutionary stuff," Mr. Passmore said. "It feels good for them to finally hear it in a public place, something that reinforces their beliefs."

yeah...and science is always a matter of "belief" isn't it? we used to believe the world was flat. we used to believe that "demons" and demonic possession were responsible for most physical and mental health illnesses. we used to believe that bad things happen to people who do bad things.

well, wake up. take that vision of nature and throw it out the window. it doesn't work that way.

god created something FAR more fantastic and incredible. Its something that really can't be explained, or even really summarized, in a mere 150 words at the beginning of a book written 3200 years ago by a nomadic peoples who had no incling of science, nor any real need for it. it presented a view that was all that particular people needed to know at that time of their intellectual growth. we've moved on. we've grown. we've seen that the rules aren't what was written back then in that little "let there be light" passage.

they are much more simple than that. and infintely more complex.

and those rules, many of which we've figure out, are not the type of rules that can be "chosen at will". When we see through observational methods of dating that a rock is 135 million years old, it is 135 million years old. the methods that can date a formation to a thousand years or so also date that formation to a million years, or a hundred million. the rules don't change. God didn't and wouldn't just casually try to "fake" that. it really is that old. and so is the fossil of an allosaurus embedded inside that same rock.

That allosaur really lived that long ago, 131 million years before our own ancestors got up onto 2 legs and said "wow, i can see my house from here! this view is great! Now how the fuck do I get to Detroit?"

Comments

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

I have no problem believing that some day (probably very far in the future) we may have sufficient understanding of reality that we no longer need science. We will no longer need to run experiments to test hypotheses. Instead, we will apply our understanding to create, and we will apply deduction to discover. Pure mathematics already works this way. The use of mathematical model to replace physical models is a move in this direction. Much of quantum physics has been discovered through deduction based on current knowledge (though often tested later for support or refutation, as the technology became available to do so).

Science involves hypothesis and experimentation. There may come a day when we won't need hypothesis, won't need to test theories, because we will be able to deduce the answer to our questions, and know that we are right.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

how will we know that we know? and more importantly how will we know that we've covered everything?

much of modern mathematics exists BECAUSE of some physical, observed, phenomenon that the existing maths couldn't figure out. math to me is indistinguishable from science, with the exception of having a sense of absolute precision (even if we don't calculate it to that detail every time), which scientific interpretation of experimental results can not have (at the very least, due to chaos theory).

analytical geometry, calculus, differential equations, partial diff eqs, all came about because the existing maths couldn't be molded to fit the data with hitting limitations that would make the calculations an infinite task.

science requires research before hypothesis, or research to refine the hypothesis. the research often, especially in physics and chemistry, involve mostly mathematics. the theory IS the mathematics first, the theory is deduced, and any new maths needed to carry out the deduction are also deduced as part of that process.

but that theory is built up to fit the existing data. to say that just because the theory and the mathematics are properly derived from existing maths and fit existing data is not to say that its a pure fact. New discoveries change things, and there will always be something new to discover. Newtons model and calculus, built on De Cartes analytic geometry and all beautifully supported by mathematical deduction, fit the observations of the planets like clockwork, literally...and then failed utterly in the face of a black hole and a moving electron.

einstein theorized e=mc^2 conceptually, derived it (deduction), and said it was so. nobody experimented with it until the manhattan project. several of his other theories, like the time distortion effect, all are mathematically proven, mathematically deduced, but that doesn't change things.

people make mistakes. or under certain circumstances, the universe doesn't behave normally.

--

The trouble with deduction in other fields (biology and its biochemistry, paleontology, psychiatry relatives) is that there are simply too many variables involved. the result is that these sciences are much more based on statistics and probabilities than pure physics and chemistry are.

for that matter, quantum physics is also based primarilly on statistics and probability. there is nothing absolute in the position or velocity of an electron (at the same time, anyways). the real curiosity now is how these probabilities (where it becomes utterly improbable to ever know the real details) all can sum out to some very real certainties at the macro level (Newtonian physics, Bohrs law, Ideal Gas Law).

einstein very much wanted to believe that "God doesn't play dice with the universe". but even he had to admit there was a chance he was wrong.

because to get rid of that probability factor is to create an utterly deterministic universe, and (yes this is now an answer of faith and philosophy, not physics) I simply do not believe in a deterministic universe. I believe in free will.

and yes, i fully respect that what i call free will may be (by your deductable-future theory) to some future bio-chemist's mind a simple series of equations on the motions of electrons and/or hormones under specific circumstances, to which i in my skeptical frame of mind would say "blow me" and see if he can calculate THAT one...

maybe he can, but at least i'll have the last laugh.

its been predicted before...

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

Something about "knowledge through deduction only" hit me and i was trying to figure out why. then it just came up on the Cosmos reruns i'm watching on DVD.

Pythagoras.

To quote the book form of "The Backbone of Night:"

Many Ionians believed the underlying harmony of the universe to be accessable through observation and experiment, the method that dominates science today. However, Pythagoras employed a very different method. He taught that the laws of nature could be deduced by pure thought. He and his followers were not fundementally experimentalists. They were mathematicians. And they were thoroughgoing mystics. [...]

The Pythagoreans delighted in the certainty of mathematical demonstration, the sense of a pure and unsullied world accessible to the human intellect, a Cosmos in which the sides of right triangles perfectly obey simple mathematical relationships. [...]

They did not advocate the free confrontation of conflicting points of view. Instead, like all orthodox religions, they practiced a rigidity that prevented them from correcting their own errors.

So it has already been demonstrated that deduction alone can not accurately describe the universe. The mathematics, the logic, the reason may be correctly deduced and accurately applied, but of the axioms its built upon are flawed, the logic remains unsound.

Aristotle fell into this trap again and again. Simple things like falling bodies having speeds based on weight, that there is no curved motion on earth but only in the perfect heavens, or "objects behave the same in all mediums", can quickly be demonstrated to be false. And often were. Bias in people can be quickly recognized by other observers.

Logic is, alone, not enough. Logic has the means of supporting itself, but not the means of defending itself from its own misapplication. To accurately apply logic to get the answer to all things, you would have to know to 100% accuracy the nature of the universe, the axioms upon which nature itself is built.

[philosophical speculation follows]: I simply do not see that as possible. Philosophically, such knowledge would change a man. To know things so purely at so basic a level, for all things to be "just that simple", would lead the man who knows it to have no incentive to derive or deduce. He would simply "know" as you say.

But he would be unable to share his thoughts with anybody who doesn't know to that same degree. His knowledge would become useless to all but himself.

Re: its been predicted before...

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

Sagan goes on to imply (and James Burke has said similar things in his works) that Plato and Aristotle's taking of the Pythagorean approach to absolutes led pretty much directly to the supression of science in mainland greece and rome, isolating it to Alexandria (destroyed in the 500s) and a few isolated bits and pieces of books that Arab scholars preserved, copied, used, studied and experimented with...

...until their own culture and religion hit its own fundementalist crack-down in response to the crusaders and the need for an absolute unification against them.