Look
If you had
One shot
Or one opportunity
To release all the energy you ever wanted
In one moment
Would you abuse it
Or use it for good?

They've armed the weapon
Countdown clock is set and
J. Robert Oppenheimer is sweatin'
Eyes are red and he's nervous
Cause on the surface this is armageddon
The shock bomb, but we're set upon and threatened
And with no sound the whole Alamogordo ground
Is glowing and cowed under one smouldering cloud
He's choked and wowed, everybody's open-mouthed
And over the ground the shock front blows, kapow!
Snap back to the alchemy
Hope before tragedy
Showed with bold math that we broke the whole atom
We choked; controlled action with poles of cold cadmium coat
To go capture neutrons and slow fracture
We broke, postponed that and we chose to go fashion
A most radioactive plutonium gadget then
Fat Man and Boy and Enola goes laughin'
As Nagasaki is blown and Hiroshima's blasted

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

Neutrons escaping from a source radiating
Merge and start atoms shaking; they begin
To unglue toward a decreased order
Entropic force distorts em
And supercharged with loads of protons they can only go farther
Cold war grows hotter--exothermal--Colorado to Joe Stalin
Coast to coast holes; silos but there's no farmer
Toe-to-toe drama
NATO and Warszawa in co-assured trauma
The globe groans everyone knows there's no calming
So show your foes and implode your core column
Quid pro quo Castle Bravo for Tsar Bomba
And move on and leave atolls exposed to gross doses of old fallout;
Slow-to-go toxins in shoals and so though we explode them no longer
Still the proof lives on in the blue lagoon water, father

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

When war games hit the stage of a gluon's rage
There's a military boot on the new doc's page
We were playing in the beginning, but grew up strange
Making radar and missiles, and new bombs blazed
And we kept grinding the lensed sights for the next sniper
Best believe son it'll pay to design fighters
All the gains of science analyzed by the
Man provide plans for sarin and cyanide
And our hands are blighted by crying
Eyes when dying lands are slammed if our grants expand the fire brighter
And there's no jury there's no sublime righter
This is our fight
And these minds are all ours so protect your pia mater
Try to feed and water good, seed trust, flee dishonour
Gotta be clean being Apollo stead of Vietnam and
Lay the armour down and be the one to stand up
And lead us on the trail of Spock
We'll elevate these motley progeny
To a future in a safer spot, an irrigated plot
Homicide a way forgot
Success is a lack of military options
Failure's not
Become a lover of a great and cosmic goal
We cannot condone these terror plots
So here we go it's our shot
Feel frail or not
This is the only world and humanity that we got

You gotta choose, yourself how to use it
The knowledge you hold and
Don't ever let a letter go
You only get one shot to stop
And one chance to know
Responsibility comes once you're a science guy, yo!

You gotta make your own mind up, man.

That's not woodworking, that's alchemy. I am refreshed and recharged after watching that, like a meditation. *quality post

You have NO argument. Occam was a 14th century monk and his premise was "keep things simple." Well the idea of god is truly simple. Simple enough for the weak, unintelligent, brain washed and deluded to understand. Look my friend, it is a free world and you can choose to believe in any nonsense you want to - many do. All that is required is that you keep your bronze-age myths out of schools, politics, and to yourself. Actually religion does have a place in schools, in the history class, along with the other "faiths" that were dumped the more intelligent we got. Religion, like alchemy and astrology are interesting only in historic terms. But, I know I waste my time so, as I said, believe what you wish. and I hope you enjoy the chains of your divine dictator.

The salmon crosses the road because it knows that salmon roe is one of the most valuable alchemy ingredients in the entirety of Skyrim.
RUN! THE DRAGONBORN IS RIGHT BEHIND YOU!

Social sciences are real sciences; the problem is they're startlingly unsophisticated compared to their cousins.

All knowledge doesn't progress at the same rate. At the moment we're stuck with comparatively a mediaeval or pre-mediaeval understanding in some fields. As astrology is to astronomy, as alchemy is to chemistry, so the modern social sciences are to their future successors.

Give it a few thousand years...

I'm at about 110 hours. I've made my character a bit OP, though. I didn't use the fortify restoration exploit, just alchemy / enchanting -> smithing. Anyway, it's undoubtedly an awesome game and I quiver to think of the next generation version.

Found an awesome alchemy java mod thingy for Skyrim earlier today on reddit.

Is there anything they cannot do?

So basically, you cannot provide a refutation to the information itself but instead try to discredit the source. I've got hundreds of these..it's not exactly a secret among palentologists that the evolutionary theory has more holes than swiss cheese. Another issue is just the dating itself..take these quotes out of context:

Curt Teichert of the Geological Society of America, "No coherent picture of the history of the earth could be built on the basis of radioactive datings".

Improved laboratory techniques and improved constants have not reduced the scatter in recent years. Instead, the uncertainty grows as more and more data is accumulated ... " (Waterhouse).

richard mauger phd associate professor of geology east carolina university In general, dates in the “correct ball park” are assumed to be correct and are published, but those in disagreement with other data are seldom published nor are the discrepancies fully explained

... it is usual to obtain a spectrum of discordant dates and to select the concentration of highest values as the correct age." (Armstrong and Besancon)

professor brew: If a C-14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it iscompletely out of date we just drop it. Few archaeologists who have concerned themselves with absolute chronology are innocent of having sometimes applied this method.

In the light of what is known about the radiocarbon method and the way it is used, it is truly astonishing that many authors will cite agreeable determinations as 'proof' for their beliefs. The radiocarbon method is still not capable of yielding accurate and reliable results. There are gross discrepancies, the chronology is uneven and relative, and the accepted dates are actually selected dates. "This whole blessed thing is nothing but 13th century alchemy, and it all depends upon which funny paper you read.” Written by Robert E. Lee in his article "Radiocarbon: Ages in Error" in Anthropological Journal Of Canada, Vol. 19, No. 3, 1981 p:9

Radiometric dating of fossil skull 1470 show that the various methods do not give accurate measurements of ages. The first tests gave an age of 221 million years. The second, 2.4 million years. Subsequent tests gave ages which ranged from 290,000 to 19.5 million years. Palaeomagnetic determinations gave an age of 3 million years. All these readings give a 762 fold error in the age calculations. Given that only errors less than 10% (0.1 fold) are acceptable in scientific calculations, these readings show that radiometric assessment should never ever be used. John Reader, "Missing Links", BCA/Collins: London, 1981 p:206-209

A. Hayatsu (Department of Geophysics, University of Western Ontario, Canada), "K-Ar isochron age of the North Mountain Basalt, Nova Scotia",-Canadian Journal of Earth Sciences, vol. 16, 1979,-"In conventional interpretation of K-Ar (potassium/argon dating method) age data, it is common to discard ages which are substantially too high or too low compared with the rest of the group or with other available data such as the geological time scale. The discrepancies between the rejected and the accepted are arbitrarily-attributed to excess or loss of argon." In other words the potassium/argon (K/Ar) method doesn't support the uranium/lead (U/Pb) method.

"The age of our globe is presently thought to be some 4.5 billion years old, based on radio-decay rates of uranium and thorium. Such `confirmation' may be shortlived, as nature is not to be discovered quite so easily. There has been in recent years the horrible realization that radio-decay rates are not as constant as previously thought, nor are they immune to environmental influences. And this could mean that the atomic clocks are reset during some global disaster, and events which brought the Mesozoic to a close may not be 65 million years ago, but rather, within the age and memory of man." (“Secular Catastrophism”, Industrial Research and Development, June 1982, p. 21)

“The procession of life was never witnessed, it is inferred. The vertical sequence of fossils is thought to represent a process because the enclosing rocks are interpreted as a process. The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning, if it insists on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales.” (O’Rourke, J.E., “Pragmatism Versus Materialism in Stratigraphy,” American Journal of Science, vol. 276, 1976, p. 53) (emphasis mine)

"The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning . . because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of science, January 1976.

Dr. Donald Fisher, the state paleontologist for New York, Luther Sunderland, asked him: "How do you date fossils?" His reply: "By the Cambrian rocks in which they were found." Sunderland then asked him if this were not circular reasoning, and *Fisher replied, "Of course, how else are you going to do it?" (Bible Science Newsletter, December 1986, p. 6.)

It is a problem not easily solved by the classic methods of stratigraphical paleontology, as obviously we will land ourselves immediately in an impossible circular argument if we say, firstly that a particular lithology [theory of rock strata] is synchronous on the evidence of its fossils, and secondly that the fossils are synchronous on the evidence of the lithology."—*Derek V. Ager, The Nature of the Stratigraphic Record (1973), p. 62.

"The intelligent layman has long suspected circular reasoning in the use of rocks to date fossils and fossils to date rocks. The geologist has never bothered to think of a good reply, feeling the explanations are not worth the trouble as long as the work brings results. This is supposed to be hard-headed pragmatism."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1976, p. 48.

"Material bodies are finite, and no rock unit is global in extent, yet stratigraphy aims at a global classification. The particulars have to be stretched into universals somehow. Here ordinary materialism leaves off building up a system of units recognized by physical properties, to follow dialectical materialism, which starts with time units and regards the material bodies as their incomplete representatives. This is where the suspicion of circular reasoning crept in, because it seemed to the layman that the time units were abstracted from the geological column, which has been put together from rock units."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1979, p. 49.

"The prime difficulty with the use of presumed ancestral-descendant sequences to express phylogeny is that biostratigraphic data are often used in conjunction with morphology in the initial evaluation of relationships, which leads to obvious circularity."—*B. Schaeffer, *M.K. Hecht and *N. Eldredge, "Phylogeny and Paleontology," in *Dobzhansky, *Hecht and *Steere (Ed.), Evolutionary Biology, Vol. 6 (1972), p. 39

"The paleontologist's wheel of authority turned full circle when he put this process into reverse and used his fossils to determine tops and bottoms for himself. In the course of time he came to rule upon stratigraphic order, and gaps within it, on a worldwide basis."—*F.K. North, "the Geological Time Scale," in Royal Society of Canada Special Publication, 8:5 (1964). [The order of fossils is determined by the rock strata they are in, and the strata they are in are decided by their tops and bottoms—which are deduced by the fossils in them.]"The geologic ages are identified and dated by the fossils contained in the sedimentary rocks. The fossil record also provides the chief evidence for the theory of evolution, which in turn is the basic philosophy upon which the sequence of geologic ages has been erected. The evolution-fossil-geologic age system is thus a closed circle which comprises one interlocking package. Each goes with the other."—Henry M. Morris, The Remarkable Birth of Planet Earth (1972), pp. 76-77

"It cannot be denied that, from a strictly philosophical standpoint, geologists are here arguing in a circle. The succession of organism as has been determined by a study of theory remains buried in the rocks, and the relative ages of the rocks are determined by the remains of organisms that they contain."—*R.H. Rastall, article "Geology," Encyclopedia Britannica, Vol. 10 (14th ed.; 1956), p. 168.

"The rocks do date the fossils, but the fossils date the rocks more accurately. Stratigraphy cannot avoid this kind of reasoning, if it insists on using only temporal concepts, because circularity is inherent in the derivation of time scales."—*J.E. O'Rourke, "Pragmatism vs. Materialism in Stratigraphy," American Journal of Science, January 1976, p. 53.

>> ^MaxWilder:
Let us begin with this definition of "quote mining" from Wikipedia: The practice of quoting out of context, sometimes referred to as "contextomy" or "quote mining", is a logical fallacy and a type of false attribution in which a passage is removed from its surrounding matter in such a way as to distort its intended meaning.
Thank you, shinyblurry, for your cut&paste, thought-free, research-absent, quote mining wall of nonsense. The only part you got right is that you should google each and every one of these quotes to find out the context, something you actually didn't do.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Even the late Stephen Jay Gould, Professor of Geology and Paleontology at Harvard University and the leading spokesman for evolutionary theory prior to his recent death, confessed "the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record persists as the trade secret of paleontology..."

This Steven J. Gould quote is discussed in talk.origin's Quote Mine Project. Gould was a proponent of Punctuated Equilibria, which proposes a "jerky, or episodic, rather than a smoothly gradual, pace of change" in evolution. The quotes that are taken out of context are arguing that the fossil record does not indicate a gradual change over time as Darwin suggested. The specifc quote above is discussed in section #3.2 of Part 3. Far from an argument against evolution, Gould was arguing for a specific refinement of the theory.
More to the point, your own quote says "extreme rarity", contradicting your primary claim that transitional fossils do not exist.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Dr. Colin Patterson, Senior Paleontologist at the British Museum and editor of a prestigious scientific journal... ...I fully agree with your comments on the lack of direct illustration of evolutionary transitions in my book... ...there is not one such fossil for which one could make a watertight argument.

Dr. Patterson is discussed on a page dedicated to this quote in the Quote Mine Project. This page touches on the nature of scientific skepticism. As Dr. Patterson goes on to say, "... Fossils may tell us many things, but one thing they can never disclose is whether they were ancestors of anything else." This is the nature of pure science. We can say that a piece of evidence "indicates" or "suggests" something, but there is nothing that may be held up as "proof" unless it is testable. As a man of principle, Dr. Patterson would not indicate one species evolving into another simply because there is no way to be absolutely sure that one fossil is the direct descendant of another. We can describe the similarities and differences, showing how one might have traits of an earlier fossil and different traits similar to a later fossil, but that is not absolute proof.
Incidentally, this is probably where the main thrust of the creationist argument eventually lands. At this level of specificity, there is no known way of proving one fossil's relation to another. DNA does not survive the fossilization process, so we can only make generalizations about how fossils are related through physical appearance. This will be where the creationist claims "faith" is required. Of course, you might also say that if I had a picture of a potted plant on a shelf, and another picture of the potted plant broken on the floor, it would require "faith" to claim that the plant fell off the shelf, because I did not have video proof. The creationist argument would be that the plant broken on the ground was created that way by God.
>> ^shinyblurry:
David B. Kitts. PhD (Zoology) ... Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides a means of "seeing" evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of "gaps" in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them...

This quote is from 1974. Think maybe some of those gaps might have gotten smaller since then? Doesn't really matter, because the scientist in question goes on to explicitly state that this does not disprove evolution. He then discusses hypotheses which might explain his perceived gaps, such as Punctuated Equilibrium. A brief mention of this quote is found in the Quote Mine Project at Quote #54.
>> ^shinyblurry:
N. Heribert Nilsson, a famous botanist, evolutionist and professor at Lund University in Sweden, continues:
My attempts to demonstrate evolution by an experiment carried on for more than 40 years have completely failed… The fossil material is now so complete that it has been possible to construct new classes, and the lack of transitional series cannot be explained as being due to scarcity of material. The deficiencies are real, they will never be filled.

First of all, Nilsson is only famous to creationists. To scientists, he's a bit of a wack-job. But that neither proves nor disproves his findings, it only goes to show that creationsists will frequently embellish a scientist's reputation if it will increase the size of the straw man argument. His writings would naturally include his opinions on the weaknesses of what was evolutionary theory at the time (1953!) in order to make his own hypothesis more appealing. He came up with Emication, which is panned as fantasy by the scientific critics. Perfect fodder for the creationists.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Even the popular press is catching on. This is from an article in Newsweek magazine:
The missing link between man and apes, whose absence has comforted religious fundamentalists since the days of Darwin, is merely the most glamorous of a whole hierarchy of phantom creatures … The more scientists have searched for the transitional forms that lie between species, the more they have been frustrated.
The popular press. Newsweek Magazine. 1980!!! What year are you living in, shiny???
>> ^shinyblurry:
Wake up people..your belief in evolution is purely metaphysical and requires faith. I suppose if you don't think about it too hard it makes sense. It's the same thing with abiogenesis..pure metaphysics.
Now, after over 120 years of the most extensive and painstaking geological exploration of every continent and ocean bottom, the picture is infinitely more vivid and complete than it was in 1859. Formations have been discovered containing hundreds of billions of fossils and our museums are filled with over 100 million fossils of 250,000 different species.
The availability of this profusion of hard scientific data should permit objective investigators to determine if Darwin was on the right track. What is the picture which the fossils have given us?… The gaps between major groups of organisms have been growing even wider and more undeniable. They can no longer be ignored or rationalized away with appeals to imperfection of the fossil record. 2

Well, now you're just quoting some anonymous creationist. Any evidence whatsoever that the gaps between major groups are growing wider? No? Can't find anything to cut and paste in reply to that question?
>> ^shinyblurry:
You've been had..be intellectually honest enough to admit it and seek out the truth. Science does not support evolution.

I wonder, shiny, if in your "intellectually honest search for the truth" if you ever left the creationist circle jerk? Your quotes are nothing but out of context and out of date.

I see little difference between this and dollars. Who is behind its issuance? Who will be behind it 100 years from now? What ensures that a company or a government doesn't take it over and issue bitcoins for themselves without labor while everyone else has to labor?

People who add more gold to the money supply are workers just like you and me. There is no central overlord for gold, because it's a physical product with characteristics well suited for money. It has no "issuer" that can print more for themselves at a whim while everyone else has to labor for it. It is the ultimate disabler of the banking elite who have made their jobs 100x more profitable with loans at interest that otherwise wouldn't have existed or been needed. When money retains its value, you can afford things outright and altogether avoid interest.

The banking elite is extremely powerful, but I'm pretty sure alchemy is beyond their abilities, and that's why I continue to support a hard plastic currency embedded with gold and a ban on fractional reserve banking. Any bitcoin fans want to put my fears to rest?

Well written, but still factually biased. I don't dispute it takes a certain amount of faith to believe in something, but saying it takes more faith to believe in science over a religion is laughable, seeing as how most scientific processes can be duplicated in a lab, and the only time people see the immaculately concepted Jesus is in stale bread.

Calling them "errors" is an error, if you cant prove it so...

I don't even want to get started with your "#2" ...but I will touch on it:

"It is He [God] who sits above the circle of the Earth." Job also talked about the earth being round."
You mean to tell me that it wasn't the sun he probably was referring to? It is a very vague statement, loosely translated. I mean, wasn't the voyage of Christopher Columbus nearly defunded by the Queen of Spain due to the fact most of the Catholics believed the earth was flat? How could they possibly misinterpret such a factual document as the Bible then but not now, or at any other time?

#3 is also a gross interpretation of the bibles factuality, the closest thing people had to a science was alchemy if I'm mistaken, and there is a reason we don't teach Alchemy 101 these days. It was full of holes where we as a species didn't have an understanding of our own surroundings. Take beer brewing for example, even the German purity laws had to be amended to allow yeast as a viable and lawful ingredient to beer because the humans of the past flat out didn't understand or fathom its use/need in the brewing process because it had been introduced naturally to the unaware brewers since beer has been around. <-Thank you science, not the all knowing bible. External sources are just as unreliable then as they are now, if not more so, smart people expect some credibility, and aren't the type to blindly accept.
#4 "The history of the bible is made up, it is just mythology"
Most people don't dispute the correlation of events in the bible to that of actual history, its just obvious that either initially or over the years, the truth was embellished to that of an Aesop fable. The bible was meant to instill fear into the hearts of what are supposed to be "god fearing" people, what better way then writing about a hellish environment and 30 ft tall giants? (wait, was that part real, or no?) Oh and Nelson Glueck wrote that quote? Impressive... unless you consider the thousands of other scientists that have a slightly different opinion on the matter...

But I guess you can laugh at me while I burn in hell (decompose) and you are in heaven (decomposing) It would make much more sense if people would accept the fact that "God" no matter how you look at it, is just a manifestation of our own self righteousness as a species? That being said, please think "peace" and I to wish all of us a hearty blessing from "God."



>> ^shinyblurry:

It takes more faith to be an atheist than it does to be a Christian. I'll point out some common errors and misconceptions that atheists have.
Atheist error #1 Translation upon translation has corrupted the original bible so now we don't know what it actually said
The truth: Today there survives more than 25,000 partial and complete, ancient handwritten manuscript copies of the New Testament alone, not to mention hundreds of Old Testament manuscripts that survive today dating back to as early as the third century B.C. These hand written manuscripts have allowed scholars and textual critics to go back and verify that the Bible we have in our possession today is the same Bible that the early church possessed 2,000 years ago.

Atheist error #2 The bible is only confirmed by the bible, there is no outside external verification
The truth: There are over 39 sources outside of the Bible that attest to more than 100 facts regarding Jesus’ life, teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection. External sources verify that at least 80 persons from the bible were actual historical figures, 50 people from the Old Testament and 30 people from the New Testament. This includes Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas the High priest, and King David.
Atheist error #3 The bible is unscientific
The truth: The bible contains no scientific errors. In fact, it reveals a number of facts about the Universe that simply were not known at the time. For instance, the bible states that the Sun is on a circuit through space, yet scientists at the time thought it was stationary. Even more amazing, the bible states the Earth is round when everyone else thought it was flat:
Isaiah 40:22 says, “It is He [God] who sits above the circle of the Earth." Job also talked about the earth being round.
This was 300 years before aristotle. The bible was over 2000 years ahead of its time. It was also widely thought at the time that the Earth was carried on the back of something else, like a turtle or the greek god Atlas. The bible taught the truth: Job 26:7 “He [God] hangs the Earth on nothing.” Scientists did not discover that the Earth hangs on nothing until 1650.
Another amazing fact that the bible uncovered far before man discovered the facts is that the number of stars is as the sand in sea.
Jeremiah 33:22 “The host of heaven [a reference to the stars] cannot be numbered, nor the sand of the sea measured.”
Before the telescope was invented, man was able to number the stars. The count was usually just over 1000. That was the prevailing scientific knowledge until the telescope was invented. The bible revealed though that there were more stars than anyone could count.
Atheist error #4 The history of the bible is made up, it is just mythology
The truth: In every instance where the Bible can be, or has been checked out archaeologically, it has been found to be 100% accurate. The Bible has proven so accurate that archaeologists often refer to it as a reliable guide when they go to dig in new areas.
Nelson Glueck, who appeared on the cover of Time magazine and who is considered one of the greatest archaeologists ever, wrote: “No archeological discovery has ever controverted [overturned] a Biblical reference. Scores of archeological findings have been made which confirm in clear outline or in exact detail historical statements in the Bible. And, by the same token, proper evaluation of Biblical descriptions has often led to amazing discoveries.”
The fact is there have been more than 25,000 discoveries within the region known as the "Bible Lands” that have confirmed the truthfulness of the Bible.
So there are just some of the common misconceptions atheists have concerning the bible. If you had any of these misconceptions then I venture that you must re-evaluate your position. God bless.


*Edited punctuation at 23:40 5/2/2011

I'm not sure that I understand the criticism of George Soros by some people. I mean that honestly. I first heard Glen Beck talk badly about him and then someone else on Fox and then some random person on a forum and now here.

Can someone explain why some people don't like George Soros. I got about a quarter of the way through his book "The Alchemy of Finance" but thats the only way that I know the guy so I'm not exactly sure what's not to like about him, or for what reasons someone should dislike him.

Except QualiaSoup's argument doesn't rest on ad hominem attacks. You're pointing to the single use of a word, "pseudoscientific," which in context (about 4:23) was used as "Some anti-evolutionists repeat an argument put forward by Michael Behe - an advocate of the pseudoscientific intelligent design movement..." (and again, no mention of the word fraud, that was your own addition). That is simply not an ad hominem fallacy, since he is not attacking Behe's character. Perhaps it's just you who interprets it as such? If we're going to debate semantics here, the word "pseudoscience" has a formal definition (http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pseudoscience) that, while pejorative, is still not an ad hominem attack against Behe. QualiaSoup used it as an adjective to describe intelligent design, suggesting that it does not conform to the principles of the scientific method. Which is a true statement. It doesn't. QualiaSoup is not questioning Behe's wealth or IQ or sexuality or what Behe's mother did last night or any other personal quality completely unrelated to the issue at hand. Ad hominem = "to the man" - Behe the man is not under attack. Behe's beliefs/opinions are.

Behe's scientific knowledge and work can absolutely be isolated from his pseudoscientific beliefs/advocacy. Isaac Newton sought ways to perform alchemy, does that mean his contributions to fundamental physics are invalid or that it's an ad hominem attack against him personally if I were to say that alchemy is pseudoscience?

Also, would it help put your mind at ease that QualiaSoup isn't blowing smoke out of his ass if a noted and widely published evolutionary scientist like Richard Dawkins made the exact same argument years ago?

>> ^bmacs27:

There was a reason I put pseudoscientific in quotes, and left fraud out of quotes. Calling him pseudoscientific implies he is a fraud, as he claims to be a scientist. It is ad hominem. An appeal to accomplishment is a valid response to an argument that rests on ad hominem attacks.
Further, as far as logical fallacies go, particularly within science, an appeal to expertise hardly seems inappropriate. In fact happens all the time. That's why courts employ expert witnesses, and we accept the recommendations of grants reviewed by peers not laymen. While there is of course always room for arguments from evidence, in the absence of such we generally defer to the intuitions of experts.
There are plenty of arguments that suggest the biochemical mechanisms of phototransduction could have evolved. Why not make them?

This video has nothing to do with Alchemy

>> ^coolhund:

Religion is part of our world. Its even in our genes one way or the other (god gene). Thus its part of science.
You cant talk through ignorance. Just give it up with trying to explain these people that they believe in bullshit. You wouldnt listen to that either if someone came up and said science is bullshit, no matter if its true or not.


How is asking a question while admitting one's expected reaction to the reply trolling?

As expected, I got a good laugh out of this. Religion is part of our world, yes, just as astrology, witchcraft, alchemy and and other superstition-based activities are. That does not make them part of science. We can observe these phenomena, in anthropology, history, neurobiology, etc. but that does not necessarily make them a part of science. I think what you meant to say is "religion is a part of reality", which would be true (for now). So were human sacrifice, slavery, misogyny, etc., for the better part of Humanity's existence. Lumping it all into science just because it exists or existed makes no sense.

As for the "god gene" business, that term is a vulgarisation (a misleading one imo) of the theory that humans are predisposed to superstitious belief. Not religion. Micheal Shermer and others make a point of explaining how this would have been beneficial to early survival (projecting agency, for example).

Oh please, justifying religion because it exists is such a bullshit move. The fundamental "need" which spawned religion dawn of humankind, isn't some magical hand in the sky that put the need in us but rather that we developed a need to understand our surrounding.

In the absence of the advancement of science, some people took leaps in imagination in order to explain things.

Thunder, lightning... I don't get it... hmm, maybe there's a guy like me in the sky, except he's like super-powered or something and makes that stuff up there. Zeus!

Really it is that simple... you want a creation myth to answer the questions that you cannot answer with the information available to you.

Next you need to look at how, over time, we develop the REAL knowledge to understand thing. Look at how alchemy becomes chemistry as people learn more and more.

Only the uneducated who don't have access to GOOD education (and notice that I'm not saying stupid), stay behind in the superstitions and creation mythos of the past. There is no evidence for that crap, it doesn't stand up to being tested and the only reasons to stay with them are because you are either trying to control people for your own benefit, OR you are too stubborn to admit that you may be wrong.

And before any addhat comes in with "oh but science is just another belief" please STFU. Science is BASED on admitting that you are wrong and re-examining your assumptions. The whole scientific method is centered around the idea that you can reproduce/predict an effect. Religions are just based on someone's old old bullshit and the threats that accompany them for non-believers.