Posts by the_classicist

23

Similarities between Catholics and Jehovah's Witnesses!

by inquirer in

http://www.bible.ca/jw-catholic.htm .

-- great site in general check it out!

1. centralized world-wide church government from which all official doctrine comes.

the_classicist

Similarities between JWs and Protestants: They both invented their doctrines out of thin air. Catholicism: 2000 years of Apostolic Tradition.

Unless, that is, you think that Christ let the "gates of hell prevail" over His Church.

157

Evolutionary establishment tactics

by hooberus in

wednesday evenings (august 24th) fox news program "the oreilly factor" featured an interview life after "intelligent design" with dr. richard sternberg, editor, of the peer-reviewed journal "proceedings of the biological society of washington.

" dr. sternberg's home page discusses the recriminations he faced by certain members of the evolutionary establishment after publishing an arcticle by another person advocating the possibilty of intelligent design in the peer reviewed journal.

http://www.rsternberg.net/

the_classicist

Laboratory experiments have also shown that when you dry out phosopholipids from a phosopholipid bi-layer and then rehyrdate them, you get a vesicle, but as a biologist, you'd know that and you'd know the reasons why.

no actually. unless you made that up yourself, please provide your sources.

It's right in my pre-made notes from Biology 112 written by the "Department of Microbiology and Immunology" at UBC. It says:

2. Assembly of the cytoplasmic membrane
(a) Self-assembly of a phospholipid bilayer and the hydrophobic effect
(i)Observations
-In water, a lipid bilayer is a self-assembling structure. When phospholipids purified from cells are added to water, they become packed (self-assemble) into spherical bilayered structures called vesicles. with their headgroups in contact with water and the lipid tails sequestered away from water. A vesicle contains an internal aqueous (=water-filled) compartment.
-What accounts for the behaviour of a water-phospholipid mixture? To answer this question a few concepts from chemistry need to be examined...

It was also in our textbook, "Microbial Life" by Perry (ISBN: 0-87893-682-3). This would be common knowledge for someone who claims to be a computational biologist as it is an introductory course on cell biology (though, I would understand if you've forgotten it as it's a very boring subject).

Hold on tetra, you're full of bullshit.
are you low on blood sugar again?

No, I'm just permenantly pissed off. You see, I'm rabid and have foam just jetting out of my mouth.

I never once talked about bringing God into this. Stop making strawmen, please.
it's not about strawmen you twit. it's completely logical that if anyone wants to put forth a hypothesis that involves a creator, they must FIRST prove that the creator exists. your ignoring the root of the issue here. are you doing it intentionally? if someone wanted to tell children that there is tea in space because a tea cup orbits mars, then they would naturally first have to PROVE that a teacup is indeed orbiting mars. you and your strawmen accusations. it's getting a bit tiring.

It is a strawman as I never brought God into my arguments. Just because others have, doesn't mean that I did. It is also impossible to "prove" God by naturalistic means. Even if God himself appears to you and does a bunch of stuff and answers all you questions. It would simply prove the existence of a supernatural being, you would have to accept, by faith, that it is Almighty God or whatever you fancy. God is only 'knowable' by by faith.

and the next step in that sequence would be choosing which creator of all proposed down through time was most likely to have been the culprit.
"okay kids. one camp says that it came about by chance. end of story. the next says that everything is so complex, and scientists have not been able to DISPROVE this yet, so it is fair to conclude that something actually created everything. lets spend some time talking about who it could have been:
we have aliens, jesus, allah, vishnu, thor, zeus, mrtobi, and the list actually goes on and on. actually, instead of talking about science, lets just spend the rest of the class talking about mythology and theology. please open your bibles, or whatever other holy book you may have, and turn to the first page."
unless you intend this science lesson to be a 30 second snippit that the teachers tells the student that there are 14 sides to the debate before moving onto cells? in which case they already do. under the radar of course.

As to your second paragraph in your little discourse, I never said that they should "conlcude" anything.

157

Evolutionary establishment tactics

by hooberus in

wednesday evenings (august 24th) fox news program "the oreilly factor" featured an interview life after "intelligent design" with dr. richard sternberg, editor, of the peer-reviewed journal "proceedings of the biological society of washington.

" dr. sternberg's home page discusses the recriminations he faced by certain members of the evolutionary establishment after publishing an arcticle by another person advocating the possibilty of intelligent design in the peer reviewed journal.

http://www.rsternberg.net/

the_classicist

uh, it seems to me that you do not even know what theories you are talking about. you keep talking about origins, when the theory of evolution does not even touch on that. the proper term for what you are talking about is abiogenesis . lets get our terminology straight before saying that both theories are equally valid.
laboratory experiments have shown the formation of polypeptides without the intervention of a creator.

First of all, the whole "intelligent design meme" can be applied to many things in science. I'm going forth between the two as they relate to each other and they both relate to the question that both ideological spheres try to solve: "Where did we come from and where are we going?"

And I think it's pretty obvious that peptides come together to form polypeptides. Laboratory experiments have also shown that when you dry out phosopholipids from a phosopholipid bi-layer and then rehyrdate them, you get a vesicle, but as a biologist, you'd know that and you'd know the reasons why.

and the simple fact that you assert that both theories are valid is fallacious because no one has proven the existence of god yet. therefore, before a hypothesis that god is responsible for the origin of life can be accepted into a science curriculum, you must first address the following:
first YOU PROVE to me that God exists. second prove to me that it's the god of the bible. third prove to me that he wanted genesis interpreted literally. fourth prove to me how he managed the miracles of biological diversity without evolution, and i will ALLOW you to treat the idea of ID like a real scientific theory. oh yes, you guys still have YET to actually FORMULATE a theory that can be tested, and submit ANY findings to peer reviewed journals.

Hold on tetra, you're full of bullshit. I never once talked about bringing God into this. Stop making strawmen, please. When dealing with the origins of life, it seems responsible to say something like this: "Life is complex, so complex that we cannot recreate it in the laboratory. This leads some to hypothesize that it could not have come about by chance." Why is that objectional?

15

Do the Witnesses really know how to survive the "Great Tribulation"?

by JH in

jw
friends

lets say that there is a "great tribulation" in our time, how will the average witness survive it?

first of all, they don't even know what it is, or when it will happen.

the great tribulation could be a nuclear war or anything man made.

the_classicist

Lets say that there is a "Great Tribulation" in our time, how will the average witness survive it?

Obviously, they're going to all go to the Kingdom Hall and put on aluminium foil hats. Yep, that should do it.

157

Evolutionary establishment tactics

by hooberus in

wednesday evenings (august 24th) fox news program "the oreilly factor" featured an interview life after "intelligent design" with dr. richard sternberg, editor, of the peer-reviewed journal "proceedings of the biological society of washington.

" dr. sternberg's home page discusses the recriminations he faced by certain members of the evolutionary establishment after publishing an arcticle by another person advocating the possibilty of intelligent design in the peer reviewed journal.

http://www.rsternberg.net/

the_classicist

You're committing several logical blunders here. First, no one is claiming that cells evolved in one fell swoop by chance. Rather, origins scientists today generally propose that the earliest life was far simpler, probably based on unknown but simple protein sequences.

Wait a minute, I never said cells evolved in "one fell swoop by chance."

I don't know enough to say more than that, but from your statements, you know a good deal less than I do, and so it would behoove you to educate yourself before making such pronouncements.

Interesting pontification.

Second, you're committing the very same logical fallacy I desribed above, namely, invoking the argument from ignorance. Third, how do you know that "life cannot come about by chance"? Are you so much more knowledgeable than anyone else so that you know this, and can prove it?

Second, actually, I'm trying to argue from agnosticism. Neither sides can be proven, although each side would like to think that they can. Of course, if scientists did form create "life" in the lab, then one side would have to hoist it's position upon it's own petard. So far the theory that life can come about by chance has been falsified by laboratory experiments.

Third, how do you know that it can come about by randomness? Again, I'm arguining from agnosticism as to the validity of both theories and why they should both be included.

But there's a lot more to the ID movement than that.

Movements and actual theories should be separated and recognized as two different entities. I've seen neo-Darwinists argue against non-Darwinist theories by associating it with creationist movements. Instead, we don't focus on what each movement wants, but what the actual theory says and it's own merits.

Do you really think that they'd quietly accept a public school teaching that, say, Thor is The Intelligent Designer?

Why not? Didn't you know the universe was forged by Thor's hammer? [/sarcasm]

Science continually improves, and so my main point is that you can't claim that merely because science can't explain something today, it never can. That's an obviously false claim.

Explaning something and showing it is logical and rational is not equivalent to what actually happened. [sarcasm] Just because scientists can't build anti-gravity wells today, doesn't mean that they never can.[/sarcasm]

Science today says that we cannot create life or even reproduce the mechanisms that supposedly created life. Unless some scientists cannot show otherwise, to say that life cannot come about by randomness is a valid theory. It's not the same as saying, "Well, God must've done it." No, it's saying that "Life is so complex that, due to the inability of scientist to reproduce the mechanisms that produce life, this leads some to think that life could not have come about by chance," or something to that effect.

157

Evolutionary establishment tactics

by hooberus in

wednesday evenings (august 24th) fox news program "the oreilly factor" featured an interview life after "intelligent design" with dr. richard sternberg, editor, of the peer-reviewed journal "proceedings of the biological society of washington.

" dr. sternberg's home page discusses the recriminations he faced by certain members of the evolutionary establishment after publishing an arcticle by another person advocating the possibilty of intelligent design in the peer reviewed journal.

http://www.rsternberg.net/

the_classicist

From a BeliefNet article:

What is intelligent design (ID)?

Intelligent design is the theory that living things show signs of having been designed. ID supporters argue that living creatures and their biological systems are too complex to be accounted for by the Darwinian theory of evolution, and that a designer or a higher intelligence may be responsible for their complexity.

And from the "Discovery Institute":

The theory of intelligent design holds that certain features of the universe and of living things are best explained by an intelligent cause, not an undirected process such as natural selection.

Seems to be arguing non-Darwinian evolution. I don't see what's unscientific about that.

: The onus is actually upon the non-ID people to show that life can come about by chance;
Well, to a certain extent this has already been done. The fossil record is unequivocal that life has evolved. Whether it has evolved by Darwinian or related mechanisms, by unknown mechanisms, or by divine guidance is a different question. Of course, the science of origins is still in its infancy, and so a great many questions -- most, even -- remain to be answered. But the evidence we have for general evolution is extremely strong.
Going against the basics of evolution as shown in the fossil record would be like a 19th century science-skeptic claiming that light works by God's direction, because after all, scientists couldn't explain exactly how light works. Well, we've come a long way since then in the science of electromagnetic radiation, and still have many fundamental problems to solve, but no one in his right mind thinks that photons are hurried along their paths by direct divine intervention.

Now, AlanF, that's a strawman as I'm not arguing about evolution, but the origins of life. I never said life never evolved nor getting rid of the fossil record. What I have said is that life (as in a cell, the simplest unit of life) cannot come about by chance and the non-ID people have failed to show that it can even though they have tried many times.

157

Evolutionary establishment tactics

by hooberus in

wednesday evenings (august 24th) fox news program "the oreilly factor" featured an interview life after "intelligent design" with dr. richard sternberg, editor, of the peer-reviewed journal "proceedings of the biological society of washington.

" dr. sternberg's home page discusses the recriminations he faced by certain members of the evolutionary establishment after publishing an arcticle by another person advocating the possibilty of intelligent design in the peer reviewed journal.

http://www.rsternberg.net/

the_classicist

The medical establishment has rejected the idea that radiation is "healthy".

I don't know, I think light radiation is good for you; I mean, we couldn't live without it.

ID isn't science, so it shouldn't be in a science journal. It's not ;a question of it being "right" or not, it's just about what category it belongs in. ID is a religious argument, it belongs in religious forums.

I'm not sure I understand the ID correctly as many people hold it to mean different things. Now all I've heard about ID is that life is irreducibly complex and it couldn't have come about by chance. This is the ID argument and there isn't anything particularly religious about it.

The onus is actually upon the non-ID people to show that life can come about by chance; the ID theory holds that this is impossible and it is to be given as much credence as the non-ID opinion, especially since the non-ID cannot prove that life did come about by chance as of yet, although some scientists are trying by experimenting with primodrial soup.

157

Evolutionary establishment tactics

by hooberus in

wednesday evenings (august 24th) fox news program "the oreilly factor" featured an interview life after "intelligent design" with dr. richard sternberg, editor, of the peer-reviewed journal "proceedings of the biological society of washington.

" dr. sternberg's home page discusses the recriminations he faced by certain members of the evolutionary establishment after publishing an arcticle by another person advocating the possibilty of intelligent design in the peer reviewed journal.

http://www.rsternberg.net/

the_classicist

The governing council of the journal that Sternberg worked for explicitly stated that had he run the article by them, they wouldn't have approved it.

And as AlanF has posted, he abused his position to do so. ;He really circumvented the self-checking mechanism thats supposed to be the heart of the process.

Which is, ironically, what Galileo got in trouble for. Instead of publishing his Copernican works in Latin for the scholars, he represented the Copernican hypothesis as truth in his book, although unproven, and published it in the vernacular, so that peer-review was circumvented.

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