Homosexuality is designed?

[Mustard Seed]

But for the most part since scientists are human, we know they make mistakes. And sometimes the accuracy of the models constructed suffers from this human fallibility. Did you expect something different.

"sometimes"?

 

[ThePhy]

science is a journey, not a destination

science is a journey, not a destination

From Mustard Seed:

Doesn't change imply a previously fallicious nature of the old?

Depends on what you are talking about. People’s idea on politics, morals, religion, and so on are almost always in a state of flux. And some of them will vociferously declare that the "old" was horribly wrong.

As applied to science, to demand perfection in an idea is to invalidate science before it even gets started. Science is a journey towards understanding, and one of its fundamental tenants is that there is nothing that science knows that is beyond challenge.

But rather than taking that as license to summarily dismiss anything you don’t happen to want to believe in science, I would recommend you actually identify whether or not an old idea (now perhaps regarded as less than optimum) was not instrumental in leading to the new understanding.

A typical example is Newton’s laws, which we now know to be only approximations to the truth. Yet the vast majority of science still uses Newton’s laws as foundational, instead of the more accurate, but much more cumbersome, ideas from Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Every elementary physics class I have ever seen teaches Newton’s laws as true, even though the teacher knows (and the students may go on later to find out) that was not really the case. See how far you get by taking a novice in science and jumping over classical mechanics (Newton’s Laws and such) and going straight to relativity and QM without the simpler concepts in place first.

If you want to call Newton’s laws fallacious because we know they are not really correct, go ahead. They still occupy an important place in the development of scientific understanding, and serve a vital function in the educational process.

So once again, do you have a specific point or objection relative to the progress of scientific ideas? I still maintain that in the last couple of centuries there have been relatively few places where science found it was being lead down a primrose dead end, and had to backup to square one in some field.

 

[fool]

Doesn't change imply a previously fallicious nature of the old?

No
sometimes things are changed by adding more to it
somehow I don't think you didn't know that

 

[fool]

"sometimes"?

sometimes.

 

[fool]

science isn't always about understanding
alot of the time it's about getting stuff done
I don't care if a model is correct in every facet
as long as it's good enough to keep the paint from peeling

 

[Mustard Seed]

science isn't always about understanding
alot of the time it's about getting stuff done
I don't care if a model is correct in every facet
as long as it's good enough to keep the paint from peeling

After every conceivable improvement and correction in our world has been made we are still at a loss to imagine any institutional setup or scientific attainment that can make men permanently happy. Even though we were drunk with permanent prosperity we would learn with the poet Howsen(sp?) that "...men are at whiles sober and think by fits and starts. And if they think they fasten their hands upon their hearts." If the race were to gain all it's earthly desires it could only exclaim with the bitterness of a roman emperor utterly satiated with all he could think to ask for... ..."I have been everything and nothing is worth anything." If the things of this world are all empty show, a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying nothing, what is important?

 

[Mustard Seed]

As applied to science, to demand perfection in an idea is to invalidate science before it even gets started. Science is a journey towards understanding, and one of its fundamental tenants is that there is nothing that science knows that is beyond challenge.

But rather than taking that as license to summarily dismiss anything you don’t happen to want to believe in science, I would recommend you actually identify whether or not an old idea (now perhaps regarded as less than optimum) was not instrumental in leading to the new understanding.

A typical example is Newton’s laws, which we now know to be only approximations to the truth. Yet the vast majority of science still uses Newton’s laws as foundational, instead of the more accurate, but much more cumbersome, ideas from Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. Every elementary physics class I have ever seen teaches Newton’s laws as true, even though the teacher knows (and the students may go on later to find out) that was not really the case. See how far you get by taking a novice in science and jumping over classical mechanics (Newton’s Laws and such) and going straight to relativity and QM without the simpler concepts in place first.

If you want to call Newton’s laws fallacious because we know they are not really correct, go ahead. They still occupy an important place in the development of scientific understanding, and serve a vital function in the educational process.

So once again, do you have a specific point or objection relative to the progress of scientific ideas? I still maintain that in the last couple of centuries there have been relatively few places where science found it was being lead down a primrose dead end, and had to backup to square one in some field.

So something that could be seen as deceptive is vital.

 

[ThePhy]

Too much brevity is vitally deceptive

Too much brevity is vitally deceptive

From mustard seed:

So something that could be seen as deceptive is vital..

it would help if your responses were more than ambiguous bland one-liners. Can you explain what you are getting at in sufficient detail so an average person is likely to follow what you are saying?

 

[noguru]

From mustard seed: it would help if your responses were more than ambiguous bland one-liners. Can you explain what you are getting at in sufficient detail so an average person is likely to follow what you are saying?

Why? That would take all the sting out of his argument.

 

[Mustard Seed]

"The efforts of perception," writes Polanyi, "are induced by a craving to make out what it is we are seeing before us"--the evidence does not convey it's unerring message directly to our minds, we have to figure out for ourselves what we are looking at, and in the process our past experiences, conditioning, and prejudices are a deciding factor.


--Hugh Nibley, The World and the Prophets p. 246

...the first thing we learn when we turn to Science is that its peculiar strength lies in its formal renunciation of any attempt to deal with the problems of eschatology. The scientist speaks with authority only because he pays strict attention to the problem at hand, limiting himself to the laboratory situation over which he has control and rejecting all else as extraneous and irrelevant. "For scientific procedure," Courant and Robbins remind us, "it is important to discard elements of a metaphysical character. To renounce the goal of . . . knowing the 'ultimate truth,' of unraveling the innnermost essence of the world, may be a psychological hardship for naive enthusiasts, but in fact it was one of the most fruitfull turns in modern thinking." Modern thinking? That was exactly the program of Thales and the Ionian school; it was what made Science Science. And the Ionian school had no sooner got started than the wise Heraclitus pointed out that objectivity that the scientists thought they had acheived by barring the Other World from their calculations was an illusion; and indeed before long one scientist after another was issuing solemn pronouncements on the ultimate substance and the ultimate cause of everything. The basic illusion was that the scientific observer, free of all prejudice and preconception, simply let the evidence work on him and saw things as they were. But Heraclitus knew better; it is the observer who really decides what he is going to see.


Which is the more deluded? The religious, their opponents constantly remind us, are guilty of seeing more than the evidence justifies. But what about the scientists? Do they let the evidence tell it's own story? They say they do, but a recent study by the head of an important scientific organization spills the beans: "I have known intimately a number of creative scientists and I have studied the behavior of a great many more as revealed by the study of history," he writes, "I have never encountered one of any importance whatever who would welcome with joy and satisfaction the publication of a new theory, explanation, or conceptual scheme that would completely replace or render superfluous his own creation." Instead of embracing new truth at any price, "the scientist actually tries--often in vain--to fit each new discovery or set of discoveries into the traditional theories . . ." as he "clings to conceptions or preconceptions as long as humanly possible." Hence "any suggestion that scientists so dearly love truth that they have not the slightest hesitation in jettisoning their beliefs is a mean perversion of the facts. It is a form of scientific idolatry, supposing that scientists are entirely free from the passions that direct men's actions, and we should have little patience with it."


--Hugh Nibley, The World and the Prophets p.244-245

Play clueless...

it would help if your responses were more than ambiguous bland one-liners. Can you explain what you are getting at in sufficient detail so an average person is likely to follow what you are saying?

("QED" is something the average person is likely to follow?)


...And extrapolate into supposed strengths

I still maintain that in the last couple of centuries there have been relatively few places where science found it was being lead down a primrose dead end, and had to backup to square one in some field.

Newton's 'laws' being just an approximation gets pretty close.

 

[billwald]

Most people don't understand "limit" and "tolerance," "boundries" and "scale."

 

[ThePhy]

Nibbling on Nibley

Nibbling on Nibley

From ThePhy (previously):

I still maintain that in the last couple of centuries there have been relatively few places where science found it was being lead down a primrose dead end, and had to backup to square one in some field.

MS’s response:

Newton's 'laws' being just an approximation gets pretty close.

Do you feel that the inaccuracies introduced by Newton’s laws are significant in everyday life (or in most of normative science)? Science has to strain to dream up measurements (such as clocks slowing) where the effect is even measurable. The closest place that I can think of where the public might be commonly affected is in the use of the GPS satellite systems, which have to include relativistic (non-Newtonian) effects in their calculations. Remember even there we are dealing with speeds far beyond what any non-astronaut has ever achieved. And both science and the public got along just fine without GPS before its introduction a couple of decades ago. Almost all other non-Newtonian situations are relevant only to those scientists who deal with immense velocities and/or distances.

Since almost every aspect of technology you rely on everyday was designed and intended to operate as though Newton’s Laws were gospel, I fail to see that as a primrose dead end. Since you disagree, would be so kind as to develop relativity from first principles and avoid all Newtonian concepts in your derivation?

I don’t know if the other readers have figured out that Nibley, whom you seem to have such a love of quoting, was one of the foremost Mormon apologists until his death recently. His qualifications in pure science are not very sterling, and I see in his polemic little that is more than a religious zealot trying to defend his turf. Is this another of your attempts to proselytize in this forum?

 

[Mustard Seed]

I don’t know if the other readers have figured out that Nibley, whom you seem to have such a love of quoting, was one of the foremost Mormon apologists until his death recently. His qualifications in pure science are not very sterling, and I see in his polemic little that is more than a religious zealot trying to defend his turf. Is this another of your attempts to proselytize in this forum?

Can you counter what he said rather than bash credentials he doesn't claim to have?

 

[fool]

Can you counter what he said rather than bash credentials he doesn't claim to have?

I'll counter it.
That qoute you responded to me with made no sense.
there

 

[Mustard Seed]

I'll counter it.
That qoute you responded to me with made no sense.
there

Quite the name there.

 

[ThePhy]

Nibleying on Mustard Seed

Nibleying on Mustard Seed

From MS (referring to Nibley’s science and credentials):

Can you counter what he said rather than bash credentials he doesn't claim to have?

I don’t know if I can or not. You see, there is an endless precession of religious zealots like Nibley, and countering each and every one could become one’s sole dedication in life. To a small extent, the fundamentalists in this forum are in that sad precession. You notice my posting rate is about 1/5th of yours, simply because I choose to shepard the amount of my limited time I have in countering nonsense.

There are a number of fascinating stories of the really great scientists, whose fame attracts an undue number of unasked-for comments challenging their ideas. They usually simply let the nuts decay away on their own, rather than distinguish them with responses to nonsense. Nibley is such a nut, his ideas are now decaying away.

I note that in the writings from Nibley that you offer, the core is not science, but the attitudes of the practitioners of science. Remember, whether scientists are saints (like Stratnerd) or scoundrels (like me), the science we develop or support will ultimately be our judge. The laws of nature care not for who expounds them. It appears that Nibley’s approach is - if you can’t disprove the science, discredit the messenger. Since the laws and the hard facts and figures that drive science are my chosen field, I will not venture far into the realm of trying to out-Nibley Nibley. He is welcome to cast discredit all he wants on my scientific cohorts (including the BYU physics staff, and the apostate evolution teaching biology staff there). When I die, I will be content to know that the microscopic corner of science that I was able to help with will not be decaying religiously motivated dogma, but concepts and facts that I had to accept because nature decreed it so.

When it comes to questions of who is right when religion makes claims that are subject to scientific verification, the adherents to religious dogma scream “blasphemers” at the scientists who see the science pointing away from the religious claim. A study of the history of science over the past 300 years is simultaneously a study of the extrication of science from the clutches of religious dogma. Concurrent with this separation is the blossoming of science into the most technologically productive field in history. Don’t you find it strange that if religion is the ultimate source of truth, that science stagnated until it broke free of that unholy yoke?

Did you know than even Newton proposed that gravitational attraction was not a natural property of matter, but rather a divinely bestowed property on matter? In so doing he was avoiding the title of “atheist” that was liberally given to any natural philosopher (the earliest scientists) who dared to invoke any claim about “material” that was not god-given and controlled. It took a century or more for the excess baggage of god bestowing gravity to gradually be scraped away from Newton’s Laws (in freshman physics classes at BYU, do they teach gravity is a property given by god to matter?) How much of Newton’s considerable theological work is the public (or the average scientist) aware of, and how much of his secularized science is in the scientific world? Since Nibley’s science is zero, and his theology is his life work, just like Newton, the silly religious ideas will die away over the years, and Nibley will take his place as another example of an intelligent life wasted on defending emotionally gratifying nonsense.

And you have avoided giving any justification for your inference that Newton’s Laws are a “primrose dead end”. Avoiding it, are you?

 

[noguru]

I note that in the writings from Nibley that you offer, the core is not science, but the attitudes of the practitioners of science. Remember, whether scientists are saints (like Stratnerd) or scoundrels (like me), the science we develop or support will ultimately be our judge. The laws of nature care not for who expounds them.

ThyPhy, I don't think you are a scoundrel. I think you are honest and courageous. I say that because you have pointed out inappropriate strategies in my own responses, as well as in the responses of the YEC's. This was exemplified when you addressed my misinformed ideas about the first and second laws of thermodynamics. I respect someone who has the honesty and courage to point out flaws in those that are philosophical allies as well as with those who might be viewed as a nemesis.

In my view the true aim of Christ, in regard to this world, is to create attitudes like yours in people. Unfortunately many people, whether Christian or not, do not have the quality of character you have. Some of the non-believers find it through Christianity, others just become more beligerent. If the "supernaturalists" are correct and there is an eternal salvation involved, that would just be (as Bob would say) icing on the cake for me.

 

[Mustard Seed]

If ThePhy gave one to me . . . he'd have to give one to everyone.

If ThePhy gave one to me . . . he'd have to give one to everyone.

You don't see it. Science is your God. Your dogma. You are a fundamentalist.
You have a fluid dogma. Dogmatically non-dogmatic as it were. You can take Newton's laws as acceptable and worthy of being the foundation of elementary science teaching despite the fact that they are often not what they are portrayed to be, but if a faith doesn't disclose 'meat' and 'milk' and all in between on demand then it is 'dishonest' and, in your view, not possibly the conduit of God's word. Science is free to publish 'approximations' to be built upon but if God were to ever do similarly with man then it's an irreconcilable discrepancy and God doesn't exist. All who mention the limitations of science are painted as anti-Science pro-inquisition bigots. On simple tangents and extrapolations you've tried to paint me as some fanatic that would round up all scientists and place them under house arrest. You know full well the rhetorical power of insinuation and constant hinting. I, like you, don't have forever to answer every hint and attempt at slandering made against me. But the astute will see that you insinuate my stance then proceed to use the false or grossly exaggerated personas to paint me in whatever hue you feel best suits your agenda. You demand that what you say be judged solely on it's merits but you feel free and easy in your character attacks. Never mind what Nibley says, forget his logic or reasoning, he's NOT A SCIENTIST. How DARE a non-scientist question science and it's pervading presumptions or those who participate in it!

We are not attacking science. We are attacking the false idea that science is the end all of authority on truth. I am pointing out that since science can never answer the questions as to why we're here, what we're supposed to do and what comes next then it's all a bunch of nonsense. Science is inherently stymied yet it is set up by the likes of ThePhy as the great salvation of man kind. Salvation from what? Does it matter? It's all just a big show. Like the extortion of ancient clergy or governments against the commoners in civilization science has set up it's own priestcraft. Only their answers to the questions is even more laughable than the mythologies of the ancient religious dogmas.

You may claim you take great comfort in believing that this is it. That our existence is just a passing insignificant blip on the big map of the bulk. But all your great scientific achievements, the accolades, and all other praise you may receive for whatever you do is just whistling in the dark. Yet you cannot admit such. That would not leave science in the first chair. Your position in society would be endangered. If society thinks it can get along as well or better without treating scientists like demigods then where's your motivation?

ThePhy "ate crow" in one of our previous discussions and for that he has my respect. He has integrity on many levels but he has an agenda. Why in hell would some devout scientific soul like him spend countless hours over the course of several years trying to tear apart LDS theology, only now to come out in such moments as this to put down response to 'fanatics' (his term for me and the likes of Hugh Nibley, who knows, he may think the same thing of the chemist Eyring) as just decaying arguments not worthy of response? Is that because of his undying allegiance to natural scientific truth and it's propagation? No. He has made many insinuations that I'm out to get him. I'm just out to expose him for what he is and what he is doing. He has his own agendas and they are not the pure, scientific agendas he claims. He may be a very nice man and he can admit when he's been shown to be incorrect but that does not mean that he does not have his own personal agenda. Nor does it mean that his agenda is purely motivated by truth. He sidesteps things quite cunningly. It's okay to spend two years trying to pick apart the theology of one particular faith but when he's later asked to defend his own stance on his fanatic stance in his ideology he poo-poos a response to a single scholar (scoffed at as a mere religious fanatic) in a scenario like the proverbial potato chip ad where the two arctic wasteland dwelling isolated men engage in a conversation where one makes a simple request to the other for a single potato chip only to elicit the absurd "If I give one to you then I have to give one to everybody else." There is no good reason for ThePhy to not address the genuine issues brought up by Nibley. He simply either wants to keep all the chips for himself (for whatever reason) or he's bluffing their existence.

For a clarification I was not saying that the Newton thing was a 'primrose dead end'. That was one of your insinuations. The demand for examples of absolute square one restructuring in any field, be it religion, politics, culture or whatever is an absurd demand in seeking proof of relative substantial change in a field. The fact of the matter is in that you are placing the changes and added corollaries that have turned science on it's head repeatedly as being somehow less grandiose than those adaptations etc. found in all other facets of civilization.

But you seem determined to not give any ground in contesting Nibley's actual arguments lest you be found, like the potato chip hoarding Northerner, to feel obligated "to give one to everybody". So enjoy your bag.

Oh, an added point of clarification. I believe I've only called you anything close to blasphemer in regard to your personal assaults on my faith when it was my faith, not science, which was the topic of hand. Unless you can dig up a specific example of my calling you such for promoting solid science and not just a response of mine to your plethora of specified attacks on my faith. In general those of my faith have not been those dogmaticaly opposed to everything scientific. You try and throw us (at least me and Nibley) in such a box as often as you can, but it is an absured and false structuring and you know it.

 

[noguru]

MS, I appologize for interjecting my comments into your discussion with the ThePhy. But don't you see that ID philosophy is going against the epitaph you have chosen for the bottom of your posts. In my opinion your strategy is not what the LDS is all about. I used to write healthcare ajudication software for the LDS, and the administrators I had contact with were quite polte and respectful of my own beliefs. They were more like Jewish people than fundamentalist Christian's. In that they did not prosletyze. They only want converts that have chosen that path from thier own free will. And not those who are forced from the fear produced by injecting theology into scientific understanding.

You are correct. Science is dynamic and changing. Do you think it should be any other way?

 

[fool]

Quite the name there.

Thank you.
I picked it out myself