RE: [MLUG - DISCUSSION] Fw: Apple computers run on satanism (fwd)

[Jonathan King <EMAIL:PROTECTED>]

On Mon, 1 Jul 2002, Ross, Matt wrote:

> > > I note they make reference to drdino, I suppose in an small jab at
> > > http://www.drdino.com/, a Christian scientist website.  
> > > While I don't agree with the priciple of 'Christian Scientists', I 
> > > do like some of the things "Dr. Dino" puts out there, such as his 
> > > challenge to evolutionary theory.
> > 
> > There are times when it pays to be delicate, but other times when
> > you really just have to say what you think about something.  I have
> > just looked at some of the material in the FAQs at www.drdino.com,
> > and I have no qualms whatsoever with declaring it to be a steaming
> > heap of manure.
> 
> Very scientific terminology :-P

Not really.  The statment was used only for its rhetorical impact.

> I've said the same thing about many 'scientific' theories that
> have come out about evolution.

Whatever you say.  But do look at what you apparently just meant:
some scientifically proposed ideas about how evolution works and has
happened were found out not to accord with current or later
observations.  And those ideas were just the ones that went extinct
once it became clear that they they probably weren't salvageable 
*and other better theories came along*.

My real point is just that creation science has no method, makes no
predictions (and therefor has no way to self-correct), and leads to
no understanding of how the world really works.  The same scientific
establishment that figured out plate tectonics and sequenced the
human genome is the one that has led to every worthwhile
technological advancement we have enjoyed for quite a long time.  
The young earth version of creation science makes the claim (perhaps
only implicitly) that current science is so wrong about the true
nature of fundamental processes as to have messed up the geological
age of the earth by a factor of about 1 million.  That's certainly
not a mild claim.

When asked to provide an alternative account, however, they come up
with nothing.  Really and truly nothing.  Zero.  Zip.  0.

The only thing they have produced are cheesy just-so stories as
answers to a tiny proportion of the questions posed about the 
implausibility of their alternative account, such as it is.

Think how much more impressive it would be if some creationist came
up with a fundamental theory of matter (say) that predicts what we
do see now *and also* why all known dating techniques known in
astrophysics, geology, and biology in the past are systematically
screwy by a factor of a million or so.
 
> > Really, this kind of thing saddens me.  Groups that set themselves 
> > up to debunk scientific ideas really do have a responsibility to
> > understand the ideas they wish to discredit and be intellectually
> > honest about what those ideas really imply and predict about the 
> > world.  The ideas, in other words, don't just exist in a vacuum but
> > gain their power from their use and our ability to understand more
> > about the world than what we knew before.
> 
> What do we gain if we base all our world views on evolution?  

That's just a bizarre question. You don't base your world view on
evolution (I'm not sure what that would actually mean).  But you do
base your entire life on technology produced from science that has
produced monumental and documented improvements in your quality of
life.  And we in the West do tend to base our world view on the 
notion that there are objective truths that can be observed in the 
world, and that theories which efficiently predict our observations
are more likely to be true than theories that predict nothing or
that predict wrong things.  That's the problem.

> So far, it looks like a world view dependant on an undersuported
> theory.

Please point out your specific objections to ideas in molecular cell
biology that are the real basis of our understanding of physiology,
development, and, yes, evolution.  I maintain that as our 
information becomes more complete, we really do get closer to the 
true history of life on earth.

> We haven't predicted accurately what life we'll find in
> unexplored parts of the globe.

Huh?  What are you thinking about here specifically?  One
possibility, I guess, is some of the exotic life you find around
oceanic sea vents.  I would have to check, but its possible that 
some of those things were not directly predicted what we know 
about previous lifeforms.  But at the same time we found them,
existing biology could make some very strong predictions about
them and in particular what they must be using as a food source
given the unusual state of the ecosystem.  And note that this
is a *big* change from even a couple of hundred years ago, when
biologists only had the faintest notion of how it all worked.

> We haven't found life in other parts of the universe,

True, but we can easily predict that this won't be easy to do.
And even in the absence of evidence, we can make guesses about
workable versus nonworkable alternative biochemistries, assuming
that other worlds are very different from ours in this way.

> and by statistics, its very unlikely that we will.

This has hardly been settled yet.  All serious work in this
field acknowledges that there are huge uncertainties in all of
the parameters you'd need to guess to calculate something like
the expected number of planets with life on them.

> The most we gain by believing in evolution is a unified theory
> to bantor back and forth about.

Again, what you need to believe in is biology, which has several
spectacularly successful theories in it.  Once you understand how
biology really works, and then see what kind of science you'd have
to construct (almost from scratch) if there were no concept of
evolution, then you'd see it's way more than banter.

> > Or, let's put it another way.  If there really were a creation
> > science worth studying, you need to show how it can explain all of
> > the phenomena we have already (predicted and discovered and)
> > explained by means of orthodox science.  You should also be able to
> > make exact statements about where this creation science differs in
> > its assumptions or laws or calculations from contemporary orthodox
> > science (and not some cartoonish and highly selected subset of
> > factoids taken from the scientific literature).
> 
> Where creation science differs is that it is willing to accept God as an
> explanation.

No, where "creation science" differs is that it isn't science.  
Believe me, over the course of history there have been many times
when probably the best existing explanation for some phenomenon or
other was simply "God made it that way".  And then we learned more,
and *alternative explanations* became possible.  And these
explanations were prefered, because they either unified our
explanations of diverse phenomena or predicted something else new
which was then found.  The problem with God as an explanation in a
scientific framework is not that it could never be right, but that
it could never be wrong in some sense.  Further, merely invoking the
name of God does not give you insight into any mechanism that may be
involved, but if there is an alternative mechanism that could serve
as an explanation, then God need not have done that (in some sense).

Others have also noted a very troubling difficulty with using God in
this particular way: you end up with the so-called "God of the 
gaps", who is only invoked to explain things we do not understand,
and whose importance seems to shrink as we learn more.  I am not a 
theologist, but I can't help to see the appeal of this.


> Without that willingness, one must grasp at unsupported theories
> (again, such as evolution).

Willingness is a completely separate issue.  Progress in science
does not depend on grasping at unsupported theories, but rather at
finding better support or better theories.  In other words, you do
scientific research, and that research must treat all explanations
as provisional.  But as some explanations explain more and more
with less and less (i.e., the explanations become more elegant) 
then they become more strongly believed in, and anybody who wishes
to convince a scientist that something else is true needs to have
an idea that is better and that is testable.

OK, so you didn't answer the below statement, and I can't bring 
myself to snip it:
 
> > But, hey, I have never seen anybody make a *single* calculation from
> > some first principles of creation science and have it match observed
> > reality.

This is the real problem.

> > And it gets just completly painful when you
> > have to deal with "young earth" creationists.  Almost nothing in
> > real science will give them the answers they want in terms of dates,
> > so they basically have to deny the truth of the entire enterprise.
> > And then they should have to explain how, if conventional science
> > has gone so horribly wrong, how scientific ideas have lead to the 
> > development of miracle devices like rewritable CDs, gene therapy,
> > magnetic resonance imaging and on and on and on.  And why the only
> > thing that creation science can produce is tackily packaged DVDs.
> 
> Which truths are they denying?

Dating technologies are interesting because they are often derived
from our understanding of the fundamental processes involved in a
given science.  For some reason, people get hung up on C14 dating in
particular, but there are dozens of other "clocks" that depend on
nuclear decay phenomena alone.  And there are some truly beautiful
alternative clocks out there, including some based on plate
tectonics, "molecular" clocks based on mutation rates, ice cores,
tree ring data, diatom extinction rates, etc. etc.  When enough good
data is obtained and thoughtfully analyzed, there is a great deal of
consistency between the various clocks and no evidence at all that
we're mistaken about the fundamental processes involved.  Now, the
key points here are "enough good data" and "thoughtfully analyzed".
Dating real stuff is hard because you can't just order up 50 kilos 
(or whatever) of pure material that has been hermetically sealed to
prevent any and all sources of cross contamination.  You really do
seek convergence in this game.  Any specific lab test does have a 
chance to screw up.

So here's a particular example:  my daughter turns out to be
extremely allergic to dairy products, and allergic to wheat, corn,
and a variety of other foods.  Some of these things we knew were
true before any formal testing was done (if you splash milk on
somebody's arm and they break out there within minutes, and you can
repeat this experiment at will, it's a pretty safe inference...). At
some point, however, we did do some RAST testing to explore the full
spectrum of allergies.  On a first test, one test result indicated
that she was **incredibly** sensitive to hazelnut pollen (if memory
serves).  Orders of magnitude more sensitive to that than to milk,
if this could be believed.  But the result was so extreme that the
allergy testing lab re-ran all tests on an independent blood sample.
Guess what?  Every test other than hazelnut replicated, while the
hazelnut test went back to a sensitivity well within the noise level
of zero.  What went wrong?  I have no clue, but the point is that
real lab data analysis is messy, and you can get screwy results, but
we know enough to replicate when necessary and not to insist that 
the fundamental theory behind allergy testing is systematically 
flawed or that nobody is really allergic to hazelnuts or any other
silly conclusion you could base on a single anecdote.

> So far, it seems the 'truth' they deny is that radiocarbon
> dating shows the earth to be X million years old (a number which
> changes too often for me to keep track of, btw).

No, they equally well disbelieve in dating by zircons, or crustal
turnover, or molecular clocks, or anything else that seems to show a
date greather than 6000 years.  And, when pressed, they can't tell
you what's wrong with any of these systems *because they don't
really know the science behind them*.  You cannot deny the truth of
something from a standpoint of complete ignorance and without any
evidence to the contrary.

> I disagree with the validity of radiocarbon dating at such
> large ranges, as there is no frame of reference for them to
> compare to and validate their results.  I also disagree with
> "young earth" though, or more to the point, "young universe", as
> various stars we see are too far away for their light to have
> been sent out later than several million years back.

Gosh, I guess you haven't read their FAQ on that point, have you.  
If you had, you would clearly have seen the error of your ways in 
depending on anything as silly as starlight to back up your 
heretical view.  Seriously, read their answer on this point, and 
then come back and tell me that these folks aren't really doing
science.

> Granted, I'm assuming the physics I grew up learning are true,
> but I don't see any reason to believe light travels faster than
> light...

Or something like that. :-)
 
> > And that's the ultimate irony.  To be taken seriously, these folks
> > need to be able to use their science to calculate an age for the
> > earth of only 6000 years while simultaneously explaining how their
> > science can explain the processes involved in the creation of the
> > DVDs their unscientific ideas are stamped on.  The more difficult
> > creation for them to explain will be the latter one, of course.
> 
> Show me exactly where they argue with any theory other than those modern
> science has yet to provide a solid backing for.

The point is that they don't even seem to understand that most of
these theories are now *tightly* inter-related and you really can't
just pick out the most worrisome (from your viewpoint) pieces and
say "okay, these are the bad spots, but I don't know why".  

The theory behind astronomical distance finding often boils down to
QED, which is the most successful theory we have of anything on the
planet.  The theory behind dating includes some of the best and most
reliable nuclear physics we have, the theory behind evolution
depends on molecular biology beautiful enough to make a poet weep,
and the theory of plate tectonics is gut-wrenching in its simplcity
and elegance.

> I disagree with creation scientists, but I've never known them
> to be that stupid.

Some people claim it is actually dishonesty, but I don't go that
far.  I think ignorance is really the best explanation.  I have
heard there are like one or two hard core creation science types
with credible PhDs in relevant fields, but the interesting thing
about them is that they *know* that their beliefs will require the
complete rewriting of science, and that is keeping them too busy
to do much on the lecture circuit.
 
> > > Interesting reading, even if you don't agree with it.
> > 
> > No, it isn't interesting.  It is merely sad. 
> 
> Know thine enemy.

I've known 'em for years.  But they aren't "my" enemy; I don't hate
them or even wish them ill in general.  I do find them insulting,
though, since they do not have any interest in actually 
participating in the scientific community, but still claim it is 
all wrong.  That is not fair.  

> If you really think this is all that bad, the reading should be
> interesting to you so you can do something about it..

1) I have seent this stuff before, since "creation science" does not
   change very rapidly.

2) I have seen even worse than this.

3) The problem with "doing something about it" is multi-faceted.  

   For starters, they don't participate in the scientific community,
   so there is hope for neither peer review nor reasonable debate.

   Worse than that, most of the "ideas" being promulgated even today
   were completely blown away years ago, so there is not even any
   interest in the process in terms of making an original 
   contribution.  Discouragingly, any time you spend opposing this
   stuff is done strictly on a pro bono basis and takes time away 
   from other more interesting things.  

   Worst of all, because ignorance is cheap to obtain (but can lead 
   to lucrative DVD sales!), you face wave after wave of this bilge.

> > If you want 
> > interesting, give me a physical email address and I'll send you a 
> > *free* copy of Feynman's QED, a book discussed previously on this
> > list.  After you see and understand that book, I would be completely
> > shocked if schlock like the stuff you see on www.drdino.com would
> > continue to impress you in any way.
> 
> Physical mail, or email?

Physical mail via email; keep your MAC address to yourself. :-)
 
> So this doesn't continue on the list like the last evolution topic did, I'll
> make my previous offer again.  Anyone interested in continuing this
> discussion, send to EMAIL:PROTECTED and I'll throw together a CC
> list of everyone who wants in.

Actually, I'm done now.  And everybody else has already used their 
"d" key I presume. :-)

> Sorry for even mentioning it....

I'm not.  Anything you type on this list is archived and in due time 
is indexed by Google.  It is not beyond belief that your words could 
go out and become useful to people in places far beyond central 
Missouri.  At least, that's what I keep telling myself...

jking

--
To unsubscribe, go to http://mlug.missouri.edu/members/edit.php

Archives are available at http://mlug.missouri.edu/list-archives/