Is open-mindedness another phrase for critical thinking skills?
Also, where is this country (US) headed? I am disheartened and slightly freaked out by the increasing backwardness of my nation.
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If you wonât change your beliefs, according to the evidence, what are you but an easily forgotten anachronism?
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What?! Science absolutely does not adhere to unverifiable hypotheses. It tests hypotheses, and dicards both those that have been shown to be false as well as those that are untestable.
An untestable hypothesis is as valuable to science as an empty well is to an oil magnate.
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Macro and micro evolution are an invented distinction of creationists. Designed to invlaidate evolution generally, because creationists, LIKE YOU, donât understand that micro evolution and macro evolution are the same damn thing.
Basically, creationists, LIKE YOU, fail (and I mean FAIL) any course in statistics, which is what evolution is. If you canât understand evolution, then you simply canât understand arithmetic, you dirt-for-brains luddite.
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Oh your god(s) are you still harping on your stupid macro/micro evolution dichotomy?
Foe (whoeverâs) sake take a look at the animals on the earth and your stupid idea that âevolution doesnât happenâ will be easily disproven, you stupid luddite.
For fuck sake, if you spent just half as much time just observing life, and spent half as much time and effort trying to understand LIFE as a basic biologist, youâd realise everything youâve said previously has shown you to be a complete moron, attempting to speak authoritatively about a subject you donât even have a passing knowledge of, you sanctimonious, ignorant, stupid, and ill-read shitweasel.
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Not only linguistics, engineering and computer science show similar patterns. Computer languages and building styles evolve - that is to say, they compete for resources (developers, customers), some rise and some fall, but while C is still at bottom C, it has developed a long way from the White Book. Yet if you look at the history of the changes, they donât really seem to be that intelligently directed; people have different ideas, some succeed and some fail.
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Let me guess - youâd like to qualify some of his remarks a bit? Only from your post I wasnât quite clear whether you agreed with him or not. 
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UmâŚ
An empty well might be useful to Exxon because one day they might be able to back fill it with carbon dioxide.
Daltonâs atomic theory was untestable; at the time there was no possible way of proving the existence of atoms. After about a hundred years, Einsteinâs explanation of the photoelectric effect and Rutherfordâs work on alpha particles were experimental evidence for atoms, but still indirect. It wasnât until the electron microscope and its variants that electrons were directly observed. In the case of loop gravity, we may never observe the Planck scale structure of spacetime directly, and currently there is no possible way of verifying any of the string theories.
A hypothesis may be unverifiable but still useful if it extends a theory and provides a consistent explanation of phenomena. This is important for evolution and genetics because ideas like the genetic theory have consistently been ahead of experimentalists. The âneedâ for DNA existed before its role was understood. Nowadays, of course, experiment is driving biochemistry - but thatâs quite recent.
(Otherwise I agree with your posts on this topic.)
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Being omniscient, he also foresaw Shakespeare (look at Psalm 46 carefully - taking the number 46 into account - and you will see that he signed his work.)
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Well written popoâŚbut Iâm no more a creationist than an evolotionist.
My position is that scientists and teacher act and teach as if evolution is
fact. Thatâs where I have a problem.
And human superiority thing? I donât see monkeys building spaceships, or
internets or cars.
Or anything actually.
Technically nothing is fact, everything is just scientific theory.
You have offered nothing to disprove modern evolutionary theory (scientists have moved on since Darwinâs day), just repeated cries of âevolution is not realâ. You say that macro-evolution isnât real, yet cannot (or will not) offer an explaination for ring species.
If you have an alternative idea to evolution then please develop and publish it somewhere so that it can be tested by other scientists.
The Theory of Evolution might be wrong, but it is not as wrong as anything else that has been suggested so far.
All things developed in the last 150 years. Were we not human before then? Did the ideas just spontaneously appear, or were they based on older ideas?
There is strong evidence of primitive tool creation and use in apes, which is where our ancestors started at.
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Well, if we werenât created by God, and we didnât evolve, just how the heck did mankind get here? Space aliens?
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Theory of Evolution.
Theory of Gravity.
Theory of Light.
Theory of Relativity.
I guess you have a problem with all these being presented as fact?
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It might do well for everyone to review what hypotheses and theories actually are, not what people want them to be.
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Yes, science does, by the very nature that untestable hypotheses and unptovables sit perfectly well with other events. I would argue, especially because of relativity and subjectiveness it is rather fundamental. There are no neutral observers, so not everything is testable.
Perhaps with a complete and perfect understanding of literally everything we could prove or disprove every hypothesis, but that gets to the ridiculousness if physicists and their âperfectly spherical cowâ jokes.
And faith is a perfectly valid example of this. It coexists with verifiable hypothesis because it is untestable. It is a non intersecting Venn diagram.
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Daltonâs atomic theory was principially testable - just not with the technology available at that time. âUntestable in principleâ is vastly different from âuntestable with what we got nowâ.
I want the creationists to provide a way to test their hypothesis.
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It depends on the version.
For example, young-Earth creationism has been tried and found wanting is testable, and has been tested, and has failed every test.
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I suspect that it generated many testable predictions about the proportions of reactants to products.
A scientist canât test every fact experimentally. A theory allows a scientist to design effective experiments that expand the boundaries of knowledge without wasting time on the trivial.
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Russels teapot. And thatâs okay, as long as legislation isnât created because of said teapot or conversely young earth creationism.
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At the time he came up with it, Daltonâs theory was not considered directly testable even in principle. Optical microscopy was known not to have the necessary resolution, and at this time shorter wavelengths were unknown even in principle. Hindsight doesnât really cut it.
Dalton was also very lucky in that the first compounds that proved to be capable of analysis were in fact a single molecular species. Heavier metals often have compounds which are difficult to isolate, so that there can be a whole range of oxides or sulfides similar in appearance and behavior but which have differing compositions. As a result of problems like these, the âwave schoolâ of physics, including people like Mach, were able to deny the reality of atoms until the 20th century-specifically, the photoelectric effect and Einsteinâs explanation of Brownian motion, followed by Rutherfordâs experiments with Geiger and Marsden.
Itâs important to emphasise the distinction between direct and indirect testing because this is a key plank of Creationists - they argue that since we donât actually observe directly one species evolving into another, it is âonly a theoryâ. But in physics, chemistry and cosmology/astronomy we have been making hypotheses for many years based on observation, measurement and the construction of theoretical frameworks. A physicist canât tell you what a field âreally isâ because physics still doesnât have a good handle on the nature of spacetime, but we have no trouble making electromagnets and field effect transistors, because we have a consistent framework that works extremely well at every scale of practical interest.
Currently String Theory is in this position - it is untestable with âwhat we have nowâ, but there are physicists who argue that the energies necessary to get to the unifications that would provide evidence for or against are simply unachievable - or that the only possible tests of the various theories would involve us being able to step outside our universe into a space with more dimensions - and so the theory may well be in principle untestable.
The definition you cite would be considered inadequate by anyone who is a serious student of philosophy of science. See my comment above about String Theory. It absorbs the efforts of hundreds of physicists but is currently neither testable nor falsifiable. Modern science is not nearly as clearcut as the definition you cite - which is rather 19th century - would try to suggest. And Karl Popper is not, contrary to what some people think, the last word in scientific method. Quite the reverse.
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