lpetrich

O zzang, are you serious? You seem like some very bad boy who likes to tease people.

Bane

The church may have but there are still people who believe in those things. I also think those ideas are a lot easier to reconcile with the bible.

Anyway, I agree with you. I thought using that analogy was poor as zzang probably thinks that metaphysical naturalism is being forced upon christians.

Doubting Didymus

Not really, the bible is quite clear on those points in my opinion. You can make the bible mean anything if you just pick your quotes well.

So what if he thinks that? the analogy is still appropriate. People defend what they think is true, so biologists defend evolution and religious zealots defend a really badly written book. Thus: there is nothing much to be inreffer from either example, it's just what humans do.

zzang

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I don't believe in a god, but I have to disagree with it being a matter of overturning science worldwide. Although people may like it that way, they focus on elementary and high school science classes which have almost no bearing on science actually being overturned. Now if they were attacking colleges and universities, that would be a different case.

So asking a question is trolling? What other threads was I soundly thrashed in? I've only recently posted in one thread (and that was almost a month ago). I never made any challenges to anyone, I just expressed my disbelief in evolution. If you have a problem with someone not believing in evolution then I think you have problems. This is exactly what I'm talking about.

zzang

The analogy isn't appropriate because the religious fanatics believe that your belief on evolution is somehow vital to your 'judgement' or 'afterlife' whereas a belief in evolution isn't vital to much of anything outside scientific circles, yet you defend it as if it was.

lpetrich

And then, O zzang, you proceeded to act like a snotty kid who likes to tease people.

I challenge you, O zzang, to tell us how you think new species originate. Are their first members spotaneously generated from the Earth? Are they the result of genetic engineering by extraterrestrial visitors? What, O zzang?

Camaban

Now, personally, I wouldn't want to live in a world where the worlds most powerful country was on its way to becoming a theocracy (as just one reason)

Teaching Creationism in school as fact is the first step of the journey.

Answerer

To prevent extremism and to promote rationality among mankind.

Oolon Colluphid

Erm, because there’s a frigging planetful of evidence and millions and millions of person-hours of research all indicating that it is true, perhaps?

No, it sickens me that people are being deliberately lied to. They can disbelieve whatever they like. But every idiot that attacks it is showing that they are utterly ignorant, that they are liars or have been lied to, big time.

I don’t believe it, o coprocephallic one. I accept it because that's what all the evidence indicates.

Why not? Undermining evolution is undermining all science, because the same methods that indicate evolution are used throughout science. Science works by finding coherent explanations. Hypotheses must fit in with everything else we know. Attacking just evolution is not possible. Attacking evolution also inevitably attacks all of biology: anatomy, physiology, immunology, genetics, medicine; biochemistry and hence the chemistry used throughout industry; ecology and biogeography; geology and geophysics; cosmology, astronomy and chunks of physics. If you reject one, because they are all interlinked, you reject them all.

Maybe we shouldn’t test drugs on animals for other reasons, but the implication is that the results would be irrelevant to humans. Yet they are not. If one disbelieves evolution, does that mean that one’s MRSA or MDR-TB infection will simply go away, that the antibiotics that used to be efffective will magically start working ? It amazes and angers me that people can be anti-science while reaping its benefits. If they think that little of it, why don’t they go back to the troglodyte existence that spawned them. They should certainly get off their fucking computers.

In other words zzang: go away. You don’t know what you’re talking about.

Oolon

Skydancer

The analogy is quite appropriate. Those of us in education have enough trouble teaching kids to think without having to deal with anti-intellectual horse-doovers like Creationism or ID. If you get enough kids to believe garbage, then you arrive at a situation where elected officials - elected by deluded voters - will start passing laws against scientific research. Bush has already allowed this to happen in one subfield - remember the restrictions on stem cell research? We are not indulging in paranoid fantasies. The enemy is demonstrably at the gates.