The Glade 4.0

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world ... 22514.html

Pope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are right and God isn't 'a magician with a magic wand'

He's entitled to his opinion like everyone else. I'm sure glad I belong to an independent church and don't have to agree with him though.

also for what its worth

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

This isn't news. The Catholic Church has held the position that evolution was the correct explanation for the mechanism of life's emergence since the '60s, and accepted the Big Bang explanation of the origin of the universe sometime before or during John Paul II's tenure.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Sometimes? On a long enough timeline dogma always falls to science. Unless it's scientific dogma.

By definition, there's no such thing as scientific dogma, except, perhaps, that nothing is incontrovertibly true. The scientific process does not allow for any statement or hypothesis to stand unchallenged. Question everything.

As to the OP, the Catholic Church, for all its faults, learned its lesson centuries ago when it comes to making declarations on the natural universe based on scripture in opposition to the observable evidence. Copernicus and Galileo are heroes today, visionaries that advanced humankind. Pope Urban VIII is a darkly comical and unfortunate footnote in Church history.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

One of the more ridiculous statements I've heard in a while.

how so? Intelligent design is the worst kind of dogma; it is fundamentally unscientific because it has no predictive value.

Science makes observations, creates models to try to make predictions. "God has something planned for x" offers no useful insights unless one claims to know the mind of God, and is therefor useless to science.

Something like half of the United States still believes in Young Earth Creationism, it's pretty ridiculous.

It's also not so funny when people apply this belief to daily life and then you have to deal with it. I used to work for a radon-testing lab in St. Louis. We'd do testing for clients in Kansas, and send them info on the uranium decay series and where radon comes from. It was not uncommon for clients to outright accuse us of fraud and demand their money back. Since the world is only 10,000 years old, our "claims" of a 4.55 billion year half life and how radon is eventually produced by this decay series have to be lies.

This is like the 10th time you've made this post.

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I think it's actually the third time, but yup, still relevant. The fact that YEC is so pervasive is both mind-boggling and a serious problem. How are we going to have educated people that can actually compete worldwide, if they not only believe this but also try to practically apply the concept to their daily lives?

Would that not apply to itself and therefore not be incontrovertibly true.?

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

I know right. But hey we're the ones with blind faith...

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Young-earth creationism is fringe among even creationists. You are reading bad data or bad interpretations of sketchy data if you think anywhere close to 50% of Americans believe in young-earth creationism.

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http://www.gallup.com/poll/21814/Evolution-Creationism-Intelligent-Design.aspx

Between 40 and 47% believe that "God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years."

It's not even this belief itself that's the problem, as God is God and could have made things the way they are while still respecting Genesis literally. The problem comes when the believers start trying to practically apply this belief to everyday life, and you get stupid **** like people looking for evidence of a physically impossible worldwide flood, claiming humans lived alongside dinosaurs, claiming that evolution doesn't occur, or my example where they think radioactive decay doesn't occur because the universe isn't old enough. You can't believe **** like this and still work in technical jobs that actually require you to fire your brain cells once in a while, the cognitive dissonance would be extreme.

That data does not support your claims, Xequecal. Read the question more closely. You are extrapolating conclusions not available from the questions asked. The poll questions whether or not God created man. The poll does not question when or how God created the rest of existence. You are inferring things you should not.

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Khross, you're expecting a lot from the proponent of science in this thread. Like critical thinking and accurate analysis.

In any event, Catholics aren't the ones who've been prone to dispute evolution, the big bang, et al. That's evangelical Christianity, usually.

Everybody who makes a headline of these statements by the Pope is just parading their ignorance of Christianity around for Christians to see. We're not all the same.

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"Aaaah! Emotions are weird!" - Amdee
"... Mirrorshades prevent the forces of normalcy from realizing that one is crazed and possibly dangerous. They are the symbol of the sun-staring visionary, the biker, the rocker, the policeman, and similar outlaws." - Bruce Sterling, preface to Mirrorshades

Xeq's claim isn't as far off as you want to make it. When someone professes a belief that God created humans in their current form not more than 10,000 years ago, inferring they believe a literal interpretation of Genesis is reasonable. It may be false, but it is reasonable.

From there, according to Genesis, humans were not the first things God created. However, the span of time between creating the universe and creating humans is nowhere near as long in Genesis as it is according to modern astrophysics.

There are Christians who encompass the 53-60% of Americans that answered no to the question about humans being created 10,000 years ago. The expert witness for evolution at the Dover trial was a Roman Catholic. The United States has less than 20% of its population claiming to be atheist. That means the rest of the sample set that denies Young Earth Creationism believes in a god of some variety. That's how math works. Furthermore, not everyone in the 40-47% that believes humans were created in the last 10,000 years are Christian. I'm sure some of them are Muslim.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

No. You're trying to apply a standard that is applied to the establishment of scientific fact, to a something which is not a 'scientific fact' but rather a philosophy of going about discovering the nature of the world around us.

nothing is incontrovertibly true. means that even well established ideas, and concepts that have been supported by EVERY test we can throw at them are still up to re-interpretation.

nothing is incontrovertibly true. is not a statement of belief, nor is it a statement about the nature of the universe. It is a policy that demands we continue to question even the things we think we know.


This is honestly the problem that the practitioners of science have with the religious minded who try to pervert science to argue against it. They ignore the nuances of statements (often from ignorance), or fail to understand the meaning in context, or simply misapply the intended target of a statement.


(just as misunderstanding that "Theory of Evolution" doesn't imply that its just something that is made up, any more than "Germ Theory" is something that is made up, or "Theory of Relativity" is made up-- they're systems, models of how the universe operates that hold up to every test we put to them (and we do put them to the test) Theories are rarely (if ever) discarded on the basis of a single observation, but rather when the theory loses its predictive value. Thus its a little stomach churning whenever someone comes out with some new finding that "Disproves Darwin" or "Disproves Einstein" - It doesn't work like that. But because the individuals making the claim don't understand science and scientific process they continue to misuse it. Statistics, findings and facts are weapons. People who use them should be trained in their use.

Also note that "Nothing is incontrovertibly true" does not mean that "nothing is true." There's no Pontius Pilate here rhetorically asking "What is truth?" It means that truth is something that cannot be known with certainty. Every "truth" we know is subject to being overturned by new evidence. That does not mean new evidence will be found. It means everything must be questioned, and when warranted, requestioned. Never treat a "fact" as something that is not subject to revision. That's when it becomes "dogma," and there is no dogma in science.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

For the record: This is my main issue with Climate Change claims (not the science - scientists do not tend to make the dogmatic and uninformed claims that environmental activists and politicians looking for funding do.) Unlike evolution, Climate Change models have, thus far, made no predictive claims that have proven true. I'm not sure it even qualifies as a theory yet. It's definitely a logical model that makes sense and warrants further investigation. And yet, the oddly specific alarmism of climate change alarmists include things not even predicted in those models. Environmental activists treat the issue far more dogmatically than ANY science should be treated, let alone something that's still in such early stages of research.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I was hoping this thread was going to be about the Pinarello Dogma racing bike.

I am disappoint...

well, in the immortal words of Kevin Smith,

"DOGMA IS DOGSHIT!"

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

I agree that disproving anything is difficult without direct observation. I was just trying to call others (not just you) do the same

Even the US court system uses a reasonable doubt standard.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

"Reasonable doubt" doesn't work in science. If you tried to use common sense to predict results at the quantum level, for instance, you'd be utterly wrong. That's not limited only to quantum physics. "Common sense" and "reasonable doubt" has caused humans to believe the earth is flat, that the sun revolves around the earth, and that humans and other animals were discretely and directly created according to their kind by a divine being. (I know, you still believe that last one, but it falls in the same category as the others at this point.)

The concept of the four classical elements - Earth, Air, Water, and Fire - that's common sense. It has a nice ring to it that FEELS right to someone not educated in physics and chemistry. That can nicely classify everything we encounter. And it's so completely and entirely wrong that it's only useful for some fantastic stories.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Pinarello's Dogma.

The only $5k CF bike that looks like its melting.

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Holy shitsnacks!