Circling the Paradigm

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I can't debate this because I have no idea what you're talking about, unless you're dictating to god what he is and is not allowed to do. Redneck phony christians do that a lot.

I can't figure out how god managed to operate the universe for fifteen billion years without you around to give him orders.

There's no point in you continuing your studies of linguistics. Some guy who identifies himself only as Fred says that all the people who have spent their lives studying linguistics don't know anything, so no point in considering the facts.

I'm sure he's right because he's got a Marine Corps T-shirt, big sunglasses and a 1950's biker hat. Not only that, he's smoking a big cigar.

See, I'm catching on. You made a convert. Hey, Charlie, throw all those fossils in the dumpster and put some fruit flavoring in the DNA gels. We don't need facts and logic anymore, we got iamnotaparakeet and his mentor Fred.

I believe nature is capable of conscious thought & purpose. What exactly is nature, anyway? Is it just a set of rules governing complex systems or is it something indefinable?

Is it inconceivable that a system as vast and complex as Earth itself might not possess a level of sentience?

Nature is, after all, extremely adaptive. An organism can adapt if it must. Species can adapt if they must. And the system which contains them all makes adjustments as well. An event of any significance always affects the larger system.

If nature is indifferent towards a species' survival, how would that species survive at all? No, I think nature cares about everybody, but clearly favours the strong. The survival of strength is a priniciple you can observe in any context, in the natural world or out of it. And on any scale, as well.

Like creationism or young earth cosmology? Isn't that is why they are not considered truly science because they do not actually adhere to the scientific method?

I don't doubt you may have practiced the scientific method, it quite relates to a lot of fields in science, but when it comes to a few things that contradicts strong beliefs, this is when the problem lies with a lot of christians when science contradicts some beliefs.

About homosexuality, I don't know exactly what are your views on it, if you believe it is something biological or just a choice they make, curiously I have seen or hear, to put it exactly, that there are christians who actually accept that homosexuality, the sexual orientation, is a biological factor and gay people can't help it, and yet, at the same time they believe acting on it is a sin. I think I give them more credit for it, not sure if I should.

The major flaw I find in the creationist idology is thus:

Premise 1- God created Everything.

Premise 2- God has a plan we do not understand.

Premise 3- God is perfect.

These three premises, taken together, should ensure that there should be no situation occurring on earth that a creationist could find fault with.

Homosexuality? Part of God's perfect plan.
Birth Defects? Part of the plan.
Can't find a parking spot? All part of god's perfect plan that we can not even begin to comprehend.

However, the creationist loves to find fault with this supposedly perfect plan, usually attributing whatever they disagree with to the devil or some other equally nebulous godlike being.

Homosexual? God punished you with AIDS (never mind the fact that innocent heterosexual babies contract AIDS all the time)
Birth Defects? You must have displeased god. Or, the work of the devil.
Can't find a parking spot? Must be the devil trying to prevent you from protesting that evil abortion clinic (which God made).

Of course, there's no way to test these hypotheses, just as there's no way to scientifically determine how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Creationism does not lend itself to the scientific method, so is therefore not science.

But of course, that's part of god's plan too.

Every idealogy has flaws, you knothead!

The thing about models is they set out to explain nature and the best fit, for whatever criteria of choosing, are selected. Now, GreenBlue, which cosmological model do you accept? Do you accept the Copernican presumption at face value or could the universe have a center and an edge?

So, this strawman, did you make it yourself or get it from another website?

Straw man! I don't think God made everything in "their present forms". I accept that life evolves and languages evolve. CAN you understand that?

What is nature? If it is something indefinable, then science would not deal with it. Which is not to say that some people don't have ideas about nature that go beyond what is known and describable.

To date, science has only recognized intelligence as it is distributed in individual species, not as part of some larger entity like nature or Gaia or whatever. It is still possible to assert systems stability without embodying nature with intelligence. Are you familiar with Lovelock's "Daisy World"? It shows how a planet covered in daisies might adapt to changes in solar input - if there were mutations giving rise to dark colored daisies and light colored ones, then higher solar energy would favor the lighter ones (less likely to overheat), which would also increase albedo (reflectivity) of the whole planet, offsetting some or all of the increase in temperature. Likewise, if it cooled to the point where flowers had a hard time growing and reproducing, then darker colored varieties would have an advantage, and the entire temperature of the planet might go up as a response.

Daisy World does not require any sort of supervisory intelligence to work - like modern ecology, it looks at things in terms of cause-effect ... if rainfall decreases and temperature increases, the species that dominate the landscape shift from trees to grasses to desert plants.

Organisms do not always 'adapt if they must' - they often go extinct.

Depending on the tilt of the planet, the daisy world might have darker ones approaching the polar regions and lighter ones on and near the equator. If the world had no axial tilt then the equator would be too hot to be livable and the polar regions approaching the equator would be too cold leaving two constantly habitable bands in between, however narrow they would be depending on greenhouse gases and the distance from and magnitude of the star it orbits.

Yes, I agree with it, that's a good explanation you put it there.


well, as I am agnostic about a few things as I am about other things, the thing is that I believe I may be empirical agnostic, like it's easier to convince me than to convince other people, if evidence is present than we should give it attention and not discard it just because it doesn't go with our views or beliefs or because we dislike a view and so, so I think it is the most reasonable thing in my opinion to try and test things out rather than just discard things and ignore them, now, I don't completely discard anything related to Intelligent Design, not even I discard Creationism at 100%, however I am pretty skeptical (true skepticism, which means doubt, not denial) about them, one problem which I see in the case of creationism is the origin, one should think where and when an idea comes from, not to refute it or to bash it, but to think and wonder about the real value of something, in my opinion here lies the problem, I think that is one of the reasons of seen as not qualifying to conform the scientific method, a basic important element to the scientific method, is Doubt. To my view, doubt becomes a problem when it comes to creationism.

In my opinion, all other theories, like evolution and other cosmological models are not seeing as truthful, as you have said, is a way to explain nature, and it seems that there is evidence to support such models, however as time passes, new discoveries are made in science, which could change some models and theories to the most closed of explaining according to evidence and studies.

About which model do I accept, well, the Big Bang theory seems to be the model in which is supported most because it looks like is the model in which evidences found and studied suggest to be it, therefore more accepted, now if I believed this 100%, then that would be a matter of faith, wouldn't it? just as believing in creationism, I don't take this at 100% and I am pretty sure a lot of people here would claim to find flaws on this particular model, wether they believe in creationism or not. I personally believe cosmology models are made according to human capabilities and interpretation of what they have gained from technology and stuff, so I would no go with so much certainty about it.

Could the Universe have a center and an edge? if the universe is finite then I believe it could have a center and an edge somewhere, and it doesn't seem that the earth, the sun and even the milky way to be centers of the universe, if the Universe is infinite, then any point in the universe can be or is the center, anything.

Sorry if the post becomes long.

If the universe has a center and an edge, the next iteration is to ask what lies beyond the edge? The center of the universe would logically be the point from which all stellar bodies are equidistant. In other words, the place where the Big Bang happened eons ago. I have heard about cosmic drift of stellar phenomena being analysed to extrapolate the approximate age of the cosmos. Kind of like counting the rings in a felled tree.

I prefer to think of the universe this way because it's easily grasped by the layman. Having the universe expand & contract over and over, or oscillate, is also an attractive idea. It could mean that this has all happened before and it will all happen again, cosmic cycles without number.

So, you'd be a Quasi-Agnostic instead of a Pseudo-Gnostic? That's pretty cool. It's good to be skeptical about things, neither reject or accept them at face value. You know, as a kid I thought I knew and felt the presence of God, but in my teen years and after my dad's death I needed more intellectual answers and I'm glad of Jay Wile and Jonathan Sarfati and Josh McDowell and the material they've written that defends God and the Bible logically and so forth, otherwise I wouldn't be a Christian, though seeing my dad die and come back to life through prayer I wouldn't be exactly an agnostic either. Kudos Greenblue.



And if the data contradicts a model, then the model SHOULD be discarded. But that isn't what usually happens in the world of academia. Usually they make post hoc explanations as to why their model doesn't fit reality, like epicycles and dark matter. Check this out about the Big Bang: http://www.cosmologystatement.org/



More data is needed, but so far it supports a hypersphere rather than flat or saddle shaped universe. Humphrey's model therefore incorporates a version of the hypersphere. Big Bang isn't the type of thing I was referring to. See: http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Cosmology.html The closed Friedmann-Lemaître finite model is the current secular model of the shape of the universe, but it has 3 dimensional space as the surface of the hypersphere so it is only "finite" in the amount of material it contains.

The current model used by Creationists isn't Humphrey's model, but it is the one I know anything about. John Harnett uses the Carmeli metric instead of Humphrey's, but they have some similarities as far as I know. Carmeli's model universe has a center and it doesn't doesn't require dark matter because all the mass is accounted for, or so I've read at least.





Well, creationism as I know it holds to galactocentric based on quantized redshifts. Check out the links and PDFs in this search: http://www.googlesyndicatedsearch.com/u ... &hl=en&lr=

However, if it were to be disproven, which it can be, then it would be discarded, just like the Canopy theory and fixity of species have been. We do change our views when the evidence dictates to, just not when other humans say to.




That's okay.