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

[neadods.livejournal.com]

alt.atheism - it's an eyeopener. Also talk.evoltion. Particularly talk.evolution, as they're combatting this craziness all the time.

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

A couple of comments (to stir the pot)

I've heard (but not confirmed) that in the original, the word for "day" really means "time period" -- not day, specifically. It could also be translated as epoch or era. Then the whole 7 days thing makes sense.

As for dinosaurs on the sixth "day," the Bible doesn't mention dogs either. But it does say that all the land animals were brought forth from the earth on the sixth "day" (water creatures and birds were on "day" 5). Of course, evolution indicates that birds came after dinosaurs, and some water creatures evolved from land animals. But my point is that the dinosaurs being on the sixth "day" is because they (the ones we normally think of, anyway) were land animals.

I wouldn't get to caught up in proclaiming that modern science must be true and the Bible just a parable. Parables are stories to explain behaviors and existance. Well, really, so is science. A thousand, or ten thousand years from now, people will look back on us and our mythology of "science" in the same way that we currently view the Greeks and their gods. Science is not any more true than the Bible, only a better parable for our times.

With all due respect to the person who called science a "parable" ...

[fiona64.livejournal.com]

You can replicate science in the process of attempting to disprove it.

You can't replicate parables.

::shrug::

I'm religious but not Christian, and I'm smart enough to investigate things for myself. I do not think that teaching chidren that "creation" is the absolute truth is a good idea. In fact, I think it's pretty foolish. I think that you may include it as one theory of how things came to be, but trying to dispute demonstrable, replicatable science is pretty ridiculous.

As always, YMMV.

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

i was being sarcastic about the 6th day reference and the lack of any mention of dinosaurs in the bible at all.

modern science isn't "truth" in the same sense as a philosophical truth. its never "true". its an explanation for how things are and how (note: how, not necessarilly why) they came to be, and from those laws one can make reasonably accurate predictions (certainly more accurate than horoscopes and "jane dixon" style psychics) of how things might react and become in the future. How many attempts to predict the arrival of the events of revelation have we had so far? how many became real? to my mind, none.

science, unlike the bible or its parallel works, adapts to new data. it changes. what we know as scientific fact today won't be in the future, just as Kepler fixed Copernicus, Newton fixed Kepler, and Einstein fixed Newton. science generally has a strong willingness to change, to clarify, to increase precision and accuracy.

and it does so by constantly looking at the real world, constantly checking against known systems, constantly experimenting, and constantly being open to allow others to look at the same data, duplicate the same experiments, and try to come up with the same result. scientists hope to be right, but expect to be wrong.

other philosophies are hardly so self-critical.

we already look back at the mistakes of the past of science and laugh at them. however, mistakes and contradictions in the bible and other religious works are still being used to this day to defend morally reprehensible things such as slavery, racism and bigotry, war, mass murder, and genocide, and the supression of women as a lesser sex...

when science makes a mistake, it owns up to it. it fixes it. new books are published with the new data. the old books, the old knowledge, is discarded except in archives for the perusal of the curious. the scientific method is a self-correcting mechanism with a 2400 year track record of considerable success.

its not a parable for our times; its a means of dealing with all data at all times. and more importantly in all places. the laws that govern light, heat, atomic reactions, molecular reactions, the lives of the stars are just as applicable now as they were 15+ billion years ago. that we don't accurately know all of those laws today doesn't make the laws themselves any less valid, or any more likely to be "replaced".

Our knowledge of the laws of nature is replaced, but the laws themselves are constant. God didn't repeal Newton; Newton was already wrong, and the universe won out on appeal.

in other words, 10,000 years from now, science will still exist as the means by which the facts of nature and the universe are determined. the technique, the process, is timeless. even if we were to determine the "Truth" of things by building a time machine and going back in time, its still the scientific process at work: introducing new data and modifying theories to fit ALL of the data.

Sometimes this includes ruling out some data items as being invalid, just like evidence in a trial is subject to cross-examination and thrown out as irrelevant or distorted. but there must be reasons for discarding data, and those reasons are also subject to peer review and cross-examination. if those reasons don't hold up to peer-review, then the alternative theory that depended on that contradictory data being ignored is no longer valid.

again, even in the face of witnessing the "truth", science will adapt, self-regulate, and continue on. there can be no new information that the universe can bring that the scientific process can't and won't adapt to. if we see something "new", we study it, we model it, we come up with tests for the validity of that model, we test it, we publish. each test becomes more data that has to be fit into the model until eventually the model holds up to all observations.

is there a better way to do it? the only alternative is to ask the guy who designed it all. if and when we meet him.

and even then, science will just consider that more data and continue its process.

Re: With all due respect to the person who called science a "parable" ...

[javasaurus.livejournal.com]

"Parable" may have been a bad word choice. What I meant was that science is the mechanism we currently use to describe and explore the world around us. Science is a tool that allows us to create a story about why certain events occur, and it really is a story. We observe events, design experiments, record data, and at the end of the experiment, we interpret that data, based on a combination of our intelligence, experience, and creativity. Repeating the experiment validates the data, but not necessarily the interpretation. As you indicate, science will seek to support the interpretation by attacking it, trying to disprove it -- if the attempt fails, then the interpretation is considered more credible (though never truly "proven").

However, it is (in my opinion) folly to consider science to be the ultimate tool to understanding our universe. We may not be able to conceive of a better tool at this time, but someday we might.

So how would we know that something has replaced science

[acroyear70.livejournal.com]

and yet maintained or improved upon science's astounding accuracy, unless by analyzing this new method with the scientific method?

science is all-encompassing. no, the interpretations may not be accurate, and are constantly being filtered and redressed through new evidence, new studies, some basic logical rules (like Occam's razor: when 2 theories explain the data equally well, choose the simpler theory. the first corollary, of course, is don't throw out the other theory completely; new data may arrive that validate it and invalidate the first one anyways).

and one doesn't just repeat the experiments, one makes variations, multiple experiments, new ways to test it, in a sense, there's a drive out there to prove it false. some things, like evolution and relativity, have held up astoundingly well as explanations for the data we see in all these studies, comparisons, experiments, mathematical exercises. science has "error bars" -- standard deviation being the accepted term, whereby one can say this is "within a specific certainty" of being the case. any new technique that reduces those error bars again, just becomes a new tool in science.

so any tool or rational process that can reduce the error bars to zero again just becomes another tool to use in science, in our quest for knowledge, not a tool to replace it.

the idealism and optimism that someday there will be a magic "tell us everything we don't know about ..." box is akin to intelligent design argument. in order for such a box of wonder to exist, it has to have been designed or "created".

i can only see 2 reasons why such a box would exist. 1) scientific methods were used to design and build and test it, or 2) the creator who made the box placed all knowledge into it because the creator created all knowledge.

the former requires science as an absolute. if the science doesn't hold, the box doesn't work.

the latter requires absolute credulity and the end of all skepticism.

I don't see "God" asking us to give up or free will so easily.

[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.