Where debating everything under the sun is only the beginning

If life, especially intelligent life, is found on another planet will that mess up your religion?    

and if a planet is habitable, God is able to put intelligent life on it if that suits His purpose.

Quote from: mjmsprt40 on 2015-02-04, 00:32:32

and if a planet is habitable, God is able to put intelligent life on it if that suits His purpose.

So you don't believe life evolves?

If life, especially intelligent life, is found on another planet will that mess up your religion?

What if we're on the menu, and we really do taste like chicken?

I don't think it's scientific.

Quote from: mjmsprt40 on 2015-02-04, 21:42:32

I don't think it's scientific.

In what ways is evolution theory not scientific?    

Are you able to duplicate it in the lab?

A major evolutionary innovation has unfurled right in front of researchers' eyes. It's the first time evolution has been caught in the act of making such a rare and complex new trait.

And because the species in question is a bacterium, scientists have been able to replay history to show how this evolutionary novelty grew from the accumulation of unpredictable, chance events.

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens.

Profound change

Mostly, the patterns Lenski saw were similar in each separate population. All 12 evolved larger cells, for example, as well as faster growth rates on the glucose they were fed, and lower peak population densities.

But sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations - the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use.

Indeed, the inability to use citrate is one of the traits by which bacteriologists distinguish E. coli from other species. The citrate-using mutants increased in population size and diversity.

"It's the most profound change we have seen during the experiment. This was clearly something quite different for them, and it's outside what was normally considered the bounds of E. coli as a species, which makes it especially interesting," says Lenski.

I have yet to hear of one-- even one only-- successful experiment where life was brought forth from non-living matter in the lab--- and that this experiment, if it ever did exist, was duplicatable.

Are you able to duplicate it in the lab? I don't mean dig up a bone somewhere and say this is the legbone of the mildewdebeast, I mean are you able to show that macroevolution actually happens. Science is able to duplicate among other things, able to show by demonstration that something you say is so is actually so.

Whether it's a fact, it's still debatable. Life as it is today can have been formed by evolution or have been created by God.

When science declares that something is true or a fact it doesn't ever mean that it is true in the absolute sense, that isn't how any science works.  A scientific fact is an assertion for which there is so much evidence that it would be perverse to deny it. 

For example only a philosopher (like Ersi perhaps), would deny that atoms exist and are the smallest recognizable part of an element.

So, science does not declare absolute truth, but (merely) that those who disagree are "perverse".

Quote from: jseaton2311 on 2015-02-06, 22:05:02For example only a philosopher (like Ersi perhaps), would deny that atoms exist and are the smallest recognizable part of an element.
A philosopher (like Ersi) says that atoms are not what you think they are. Atoms are a subset of the general order of things and they follow the order. Atoms do not make up the order for all other things. QM happens to agree with me in that atoms are not particles; the notion of fundamental particles was in error all along.

We have found no reason to doubt that scientific theories are applicable universally […]

We have found no reason to doubt that scientific theories are applicable universally […]

I said "part" not particle, but let us not split hairs on that when in actuality there are no particles at all.  What is the smallest fundamental particle of matter?  There is none because when you look deeper and deeper into so-called particles at the subatomic level nothing but energy emerges. 

Quarks are theorized to be made of vibrating strings of pure energy, ...

Quote from: jseaton2311 on 2015-02-06, 15:45:58We have found no reason to doubt that scientific theories are applicable universally […]You, sir, must live in an alternate universe!

Even such a commonplace as consciousness eludes scientific elucidation. (Let alone, explication.) Science is good at what it does.
It sucks, at what it doesn't do.

Quote from: jseaton2311 on 2015-02-06, 15:45:58We have found no reason to doubt that scientific theories are applicable universally […]Note three "theories" of Science that are universally applicable.

This goes to prove my point: Atoms (as particles) was the wrong theory all along.

Quote from: jseaton2311 on 2015-02-06, 23:45:58Quarks are theorized to be made of vibrating strings of pure energy, ...

Ersi: Strings are wrong too. Just plain wrong. One of the reasons why the scientific community has ended up saying they have no claim to (absolute) truth is their track record for having been wrong.

Even you have acknowledged that any original hypothesis in science is simply a guess--that's how it all starts.  When humans guess, they can be wrong much of the time or at least partially wrong.  When hypotheses are tested and proven false in even one instance, then they either need to be discarded or, most often, modified and tested again (wash, rinse, repeat).    

Quote from: jseaton2311 on 2015-02-07, 16:14:44

Even you have acknowledged that any original hypothesis in science is simply a guess--that's how it all starts.  When humans guess, they can be wrong much of the time or at least partially wrong.  When hypotheses are tested and proven false in even one instance, then they either need to be discarded or, most often, modified and tested again (wash, rinse, repeat).  

Sure I acknowledged it, but this does not redeem science in any way. It only makes clear that science needs philosophy. Philosophy provides the method of sensible guesses. Philosophy is the art of asking the right questions and foreseeing all the possible answers.

I will relent to some degree that philosophy can be helpful to science after reading this from Oakdale.

Physicist Lee Smolin, in his 1997 book The Life of the Cosmos, goes one step further by applying the principles of natural selection to a multiverse model. Smolin postulates that black holes give rise to new universes, and that the physical laws of a universe determine its propensity to give rise to black holes. A universe’s set of physical laws thus serves as its “genome,” and these “genomes” differ with respect to their propensity to allow a universe to “reproduce” by creating new universes. For example, it happens that a universe with a lot of carbon is very good at making black holes — and a universe with a lot of carbon is also one favorable to the evolution of life.

I will relent to some degree that philosophy can be helpful to science...