Post game thread

wearing the Wolves cap

still doesn’t mean there isn’t a God.

Imagine that post-apocalyptic world. Now, imagine trying to rebuild society.

You need to find the manuals for the nuclear reactions, right away. Sometime soon you’re going to need to get some information about infectious diseases, so that cholera doesn’t keep coming around so much.

When will you need to rediscover that [X religious authority] requires or wants [X ritual] to be performed? When will that specific ritual be necessary in order for society, or human morality, to continue? Relative to knowledge of how to harvest plants, when?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Kuhn

I have a lot of admiration for Kuhn’s philosophy of science. Contrarian scientists who challenge some basic foundational stuff are the ones who end up making the big leaps in progress happen. I think we’ve reached the point where we assume that we already know so much that any further progress will basically be incremental. The grant system and peer review system lends itself to way, way too much uniformity in my opinion.

I probably made too many broad statements that I didn’t flesh out there…

Sorry. While it is true that nothing can be ‘definitively’ proven in science, many things are factual. Formally, we must concede that we can never prove that we are not in the Matrix and encapsulated in Bart Simpson’s fish bowl. Nonetheless, gravity is fact, plate tectonics is fact, evolution is fact. Definitively, these things are real, they have happened, and continue to happen. We can observe them, make testable predictions, etc. It is impossible to dispute the factual nature of these things without going to Matrix-level improbabilities (i.e. supernatural forces, alternative universes, etc).

Evolution is studied today to learn more about it, but it will never be shown to be false or not factual. People study gravity to learn more about it, bu nobody will ever find evidence that gravity doesn’t exist (they will find some extraordinary facet of gravitation that nobody has conceived of yet). Similarly, nobody will ever find that evolution is not real though their discoveries will slightly alter how we describe it. Some amazing new things are being discovered, will be discovered, and have been discovered every day since Darwin. But, again, nobody will ever discover that we’ve been duped and the variety of life on Earth can be explained by something other than evolution.

I am not accusing you, WBT, of this, but this is the time (i.e. when ‘holes’ in evolution come up) that Creationists/IDers will decry the conspiracy that denounces people who disagree with evolution. You do say ‘denouncing others refusal to follow along..’ for example. This idea (grotesquely exploited in the abhorrent ‘No Intelligence Allowed’) is total nonsense. Every scientist dreams of making a history-altering discovery. Providing any (real) evidence that evolution is not a fact would be Earth shatteringly huge and make that scientist a historical figure pn par with Darwin, Einstein, etc. Hasn’t happened, never will (not for lack of trying or presence of a conspiracy).

And, no, I am not letting this go :)

are the books now collected in the bible, the apocrypha, and Josephus. The first two were written by people trying to disseminate the idea that Yeshua was the son of God, and the Josephus documents have been called into question because of the possibility he was part of the same movement.

That’s scant evidence, and questionable to boot, considering the central documents in support of the Messiah idea were written between 10 and 90 years after his supposed death.