mofo:
This?
http://news-info.wustl.edu/tips/page/normal/6845.html

freakbass:
He's all about shattering what some call "Neo Darwinist Dogma" and does so very eloquently as he is an absolute genius. (imho)

IMBOLCPunxsutawneyPhil: But, does anyone care about cold hard facts when you can believe in the warm fuzzy glow of the enternal god licking your perineum for the rest of your consciousness?

That's the motivation, it is a reptillian characteristic of mammals to persue the maternal bonding-lick so prevelant in our genus, perhaps our phylum!

We have merely replaced that reassuring lovingly given and recieved demurrment from our mother with an ebbulent artificial memory invoked at will by the right "state of grace". Which if you read into it, is a post/pre-orgasmic state of purity and non-fart-stinkiness.

It's the lies that make you feel good.

Can you tell me how that's going to make any sort of difference to the rate of spin of a cesium attom or a self-replicating polypeptide?~?!

Conversely, how will the science, fact, truth, reality, causal obviousness, {and other strong words meaning that you would be stupid to not notice it}, affect an emotional attachment to irrational pleasure?

They can't do it. No thought, or observation will alter their reptillian draw to pleasure of eating, fucking, or the precursor to all these states: feeling safe. Stupid feels safe. Safe is quiet and free of doubt. Safe has no challenges, goals or obstacles.

Safe is happy and good.

Your attempt here is a great start at attempting to disrupt the safety and it's subesquent narcoleptic stupor, but you are really just upset that you are upset about something so obvious.

I suggest trying to find not a sudden or obvious contradiction to their belief system, but something less drastic. On a biological level, systems never really appreciate SHOCK!, but they do respond favorably to moderate and subtle environmental pressures which cause a gradual transition amoungst competencies.

You see, each individual contains a tool box--this box is multi-faceted and able to do just about everything. However, it would be impractical from a resources perspective to fully develop and elaborate each available function; simply put, Superman is too expensive to create. As such, the competencies and tools are selected amoungst a cast of available circumstances. One of these well-developed tools is your focus.

What circumstance brings about the religious? That is your obstacle, not the details of a sqwabble they have with a boundary of thiers, namely: intellect.

Wrecker:

But that damn sure won't stop us from trying.

You can attack their philosophy, but don't attack their motivation for belief. You're just as bad until you do experiments yourself to confirm or disprove your theories of how we came to exist.

Nocal's third post: just because you think the eyeball is crappy and not perfect doesn't mean it wasn't designed. Your argument shows you're underestimating your enemy. A good creationist's reply would be, "you can't be expected to know God's plans. What you perceive as imperfect is exactly perfect to him." Also, even if you are right and God is a cruel moron, it doesn't mean he/she didn't design everything in 6 days.

At what point can you say, "here is where God created everything and manifested my destiny?" If you say, "oh that's easy, before the big bang," then you are missing the point, the big bang, in this picture of scientific evidence,, IS the beginning. There was nothing before it. So maybe god was created in the big bang. When did he start controlling the universe? You just can't inject god into the archives of scientific evidence, he isn't here or there or anywhere. There's no room in the picture for God, as a creator, designer, or controller, as far as science is concerned. There's no part of the theory where we say, "shit guys, we don't have any idea what happened here, maybe this is room for God to wiggle in and have a hand in the creation."

Anyway you argue it, you are contradicting science. So get off your ass and start defending what you believe in, or if you can't, stop believing in it. Don't settle for "science doesn't directly contradict religion, they can mutually coexist," because science DOES contradict religion and they are competing philosophies.

Dawkins sez:
The evidence is so strong that any sane, educated person has got to believe in evolution. Now there are plenty of sane, educated, religious people: there are professors of theology, and there are bishops ... and so obviously they all believe in evolution or they wouldn't have gotten where they have because they would be too stupid or too ignorant. So, it is a fact that there are evolutionists who are religious and there are religious people who are evolutionists.

Also, that science article you linked to doesn't prove anything about order being a product of disorder. All it says is that in one carefully and unnaturaly constructed system of swinging pendulums and weights, there was a non-linear response to a linear input. This doesn't show anything. You can tell how unsciency this is by checking out hte researchers. Washington University in St Lous? Gimme a fucking break. I'm not an academic elitist, but here I think we have an experiment that nobody outside of WUSTL considers rigourous or demonstrative of a principle.

Your ideas of the universe having 'order' and 'disorder', which you don't define, aren't really mathematically or philosophically rigorous. From what I gather, you've managed to reproduce Nietzsche's statment, "from chaos comes order" without taking the time to carefully define and explain chaos and order so that your statements make sense.

bring it

dinozoa: .......
...
...
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Phil: ..you are taking a lot of this on faith. You have faith that the scientific method works. Science is your equivalent god licking your perineaum, it appeals at a basic level to your need for order and reason, just as faith appeals to similar needs in the religious. You can attack their philosophy, but don't attack their motivation for belief. You're just as bad until you do experiments yourself to confirm or disprove your theories of how we came to exist. ...
...
... &c....&c...

. You can tell how unsciency this is by checking out hte researchers. Washington University in St Lous? Gimme a fucking break. I'm not an academic elitist, but here I think we have an experiment that nobody outside of WUSTL considers rigourous or demonstrative of a principle.

that doesn't mean only weak minded people are religious.

Your ideas of the universe having 'order' and 'disorder', which you don't define

While working on their model — a network of interconnected pendulums, or "oscillators" — the researchers noticed that when driven by ordered forces the various pendulums behaved chaotically and swung out of sync like a group of intoxicated synchronized swimmers. This was unexpected — shouldn't synchronized forces yield synchronized pendulums?

Nobody does experiments with masses on springs and pendulums or whatever, because all that stuff can be modeled very easily on a computer. The only reason these guys at WUSTL did this is because they knew if they had a nifty set up, they could get very bizarre effects from very simple inputs. But that's besides the point. The 'ordered forces' they were working with are things that can be modeled with newtonian dynamics. There's nothing there that's not understood. Their experiment is essentially like pulling the string on a gyroscope and watching it go. It's amazing, even if you know some physics, until you sit down and crunch some equations (like 3 of them) and figure out exactly what makes the gyroscope stay up. In their case, they probably have more like 20 or so equations modeling the system.

According to a computational study [...] While working on their model

The physicists' research is not only hard to grasp for non-physicists, but puzzling for physicists, too. As supervisor Ralf Wessel, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of physics said, "Every physicist who hears this is surprised."

Research on the role of disorder in complex systems is quite new and not well understood.

"This is of course basic research," said Brandt. "But what you can learn from this is that complex systems ... sometimes behave in a very unexpected way, completely opposite to your intuition or expectation.

Nocal: here's my argument, in its essentials. From a scientists standpoint, you can't decide that only scientifically proven/provable ideas are worth merit AND claim God exists at the same time. In that sense, they are mutually exclusive to the scientist. To the religious person, well, they can pretty much fit whatever they want into their belief system, since it's all predicated on blind faith, but still, most of them choose to disagree with the results of science where it contradicts the bible or whatever.

By definition, the big bang was the first thing that happened in our universe. You can describe a time scale of things that happened before the big bang, but because these things had no observable effect on our universe, it's just as scientific as claiming God created the big bang. The point is, science doesn't know what caused the big bang, and it doesn't care, because we can't make any observations or do any experiments on that time period, because it nothing that existed pre-big bang had any effect on stuff that exists now. So says science.

freakbass:
And for what it's worth, I believe that Science often demands nearly as much faith as Religion. but a proper scientist following the scientific method, which is nothing more than a good tool, will devleop a hypothesis and then TRY TO PROVE IT WRONG regardless of his 'belief'. This is something I do not see at all within Religious Philosophy.

dinozoa: Vasudeva: you can argue about the merits of science and religion as epistemological methods, at which point science is unarguably better. However, if God exists and all science is wrong and dinosaur fossils are there to test our faith, it doesn't matter how good an epistemological method science is in the absence of God, it will never produce the truth.

Science only works once you assume there is a rational reason for an observation, and God is certainly not rational or logical or observable.

So to a True Believer, faith in religion is no different from faith in the scientific method, because to the True Believer, the scientist assumes something unreasonable that requires faith; the lack of existence of God.

Speaking of Dawkins, since when is he so great? He's more of a popular science writer than an actual scientist. His scientific career peaked when he published the selfish gene, which was what, 20-30 years ago? Since then he has become less of a scientist and more of a pundit and a philosopher. Does this make his opinions less valid? No. Does it make him less respectable, and therefore trump the "we should all agree with Dawkins because he is so respectable card?" I think so.

However, if God exists and all science is wrong and dinosaur fossils are there to test our faith

To the religious person, well, they can pretty much fit whatever they want into their belief system, since it's all predicated on blind faith, but still, most of them choose to disagree with the results of science where it contradicts the bible or whatever.

dinozoa: Vasudeva:

Occam's razor says the simplest solution is correct, not that there is a rational reason for an observation. Sometimes rational isn't simple.

dinozoa: Nocal: I don't get this idea of God as the universe. Can you explain this?

sunny77: Beating the odds, to me , is more than mere coincidence.

i asked her how she could really explain the relative perfection of the earth in terms of distance from the sun to supply just the right temperature (if we were any closer, we couldn't, as mund and nocal stated, undergo any sudden changes to adapt to those conditions of extreme heat, and the earth would flood as a result of the polar ice caps melting)

vasudeva:

Rather than go out on a real creaky limb to assume that there's a reason to believe the people who want me to think there's a giant magic being who has all of us stuck on a planet with incredibly realistic but nonetheless hollow scientifically measurable yet ultimately meaningless phenomena, in order that scientists may have jobs and the godless intellectuals can be seduced away from the True Word by paltry human conceits... let's go with the simpler concept that doesn't require a lot of bullshit bootstrapping.

_{On 2006-04-24 at 10:58:17, vasudeva praised Jejus}

Nocal: I don't get this idea of God as the universe. Can you explain this?

Look, Nocal, that article isn't the research paper submitted by the scientists at the university. It was a student publication. This is not a pillar of journalism here. If all the scientists who heard about the evidence were amazed, it's because the reporter interviewed only a couple of scientists. If the study returned experimental results that defied computer models, it's because the computer models weren't sophisticated enough. I feel at this point you're defending the article because I'm attacking it, not becasue you find it epiphanous.

The physicists' research is not only hard to grasp for non-physicists, but puzzling for physicists, too. As supervisor Ralf Wessel, Ph.D., Washington University associate professor of physics said, "Every physicist who hears this is surprised."

The effects of disorder in external forces on the dynamical behavior of coupled nonlinear oscillator networks are studied. When driven synchronously, i.e., all driving forces have the same phase, the networks display chaotic dynamics. We show that random phases in the driving forces result in regular, periodic network behavior. Intermediate phase disorder can produce network synchrony. Specifically, there is an optimal amount of phase disorder, which can induce the highest level of synchrony. These results demonstrate that the spatiotemporal structure of external influences can control chaos and lead to synchronization in nonlinear systems. © 2006 The American Physical Society.

I think I get this, but not why the god is always described as fractal. What does fractal have to do with it?

Prior to the creation of man, Böhme wrote, God was an undifferentiated single unity defined by the absence of everything else -- the Abyss, or "Ungrund." Creation was the result of the Ungrund dividing from its state of original unity -- a proposition completely familiar to Taoists but foreign and offensive to Böhme's fellow Lutherans.

Even more controversially, Böhme argued that God could not be omniscient and omnipotent, since He was eternal and unique. "He knows no beginning, and also nothing like Himself, and also no end," Böhme wrote, arguing that God created man in His own image so that He could learn about Himself.

To initiate this learning process, God rendered Himself into positive and negative aspects -- yin and yang to the Taoists, although the material substance of Böhme's universe is not itself synonymous with God.

Prior to the initial split, God was only a potential mind with an unformed longing to know itself. After the split, God iterated into a binary-based matrix, continually increasing in complexity as He collected more and more information about Himself. In other words, Böhme's God evolves with the passage of time, in sharp contrast to the traditional Judeo-Christian view of a perfect, complete and unchanging figure who exists outside the normal flow of time.

Rather than go out on a real creaky limb to assume that there's a reason to believe the people who want me to think there's a giant magic being who has all of us stuck on a planet

NoCal: It's not a general result, and you're using it in a manner that