i would say he just set off a random simulation that he didnt have to mess with. to see what results you could get rather than aiming for results
Well, but then you have to assume God set it off and left it unsupervised. Smacks of negligence somewhat, doesn't it?
exactly. whats the point in religion apart from comfort that something bigger is looking out for you? i prefer to believe in the good and evils of people rather than a book.
What really struck me when I really understood evolution to any degree was how inevitable it is/was. It's an emergent property that you will get in any system where you get differential reproduction based on "life" success where that success is determined by inheritable factors. As soon as you get certain basics in place evolution will just happen. So in a sense God can't have invented it because it would exist whether he desired it or not. You can see it in the design of cars all the time. A certain feature (ABS for example) gets designed for a certain model. That's a change in the basic DNA of car design. A mutation. That car sells well compared to cars that don't have it. ABS becomes more common in the car gene pool. That's success (in car manufacture terms). Other car designers "adopt" that mutation (which isn't how evolution works in animals). Pretty soon "ABS" is so common in cars that it has become part of the DNA of cars.
which adds to the point i was saying - god is prolly some dude who set off a simulation (our universe) to see what would develop and emerge. he's a scientist. he had no goals, only to see what'd happen
I don't normally engage in non-martial threads, its not what I come to MAP for. But I couldn't resist this one. Frankly I haven't watched the film, I could only get this far in the Wiki article: "The film contends that the mainstream science establishment suppresses academics who believe they see evidence of intelligent design" No it doesn't. Anyone who believes such a thing is clearly living in a fantasy world. The science establishment doesn't suppress anybody. It might ignore them, possibly even ridicule them. But suppress? Utter hogwash. If there were evidence for intelligent design it would be taken seriously. But those who support the idea don't really understand what the word 'evidence' means and don't really grasp the scientific process. Now, back to hitting people. Mike
I think this is the real issue here. I was born and raised as a Roman Catholic. Naturally this led to me becoming an atheist, at the age of 11. Having been on the end of christian indoctrination as a child (far more at school than at home happily) I was careful for many years not to foist my philosophical/religious views on anyone else. You don't try to indoctrinate me and I won't try to indoctrinate you. But I realise now that its not that simple. Here in the UK I think we can be forgiven for thinking we live in a largely secular society in which disparate aspects of human endeavour (such as science and religion) occupy appropriate pigeonholes. But its not like that in the US, where people who adhere to bizarre 'anti-scientific' doctrines wield real political power. They are a real danger to society and so should be resisted at every opportunity. Mike
There is no one in the American government with enough power to stop scientific progress. There are a few who like to think they are, but the truth is that those in the government who have tried to stop things like the teaching of evolution and stem cell research have all ultimately failed.
Yes, except it really isn't as simple as that. The particular model which is used to create those famous hockey stick graphs, will produce the same shape from almost any sampling of data - it has been tried with random data and still produces the 'hocket stick'. What's needed is an actually accurate model, which won't produce the same results regardless of the data. This is why there's controversy.
A random sample of randomly generated data produced the same projection profile as climate change data? ...yeah, not buying it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hockey_stick_graph http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/08/paper-fake-random-data-are-better.html http://www.second-opinions.co.uk/hockey-stick-2.html http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~lambert/parody/tcs/ Are we done now?
It certainly shouldn't produce the same results if the model is not biased towards a hockey stick shape. You can get the same from brownian motion measurements.
