Please forgive the length and shotgun approach of this post.
There have been a number of comments and underlying themes on this thread which I have found amusing, informative, imaginative an many other things. In no particular order I wanted to comment on a few of them.
Early on,
Barbi said:
. . .while religion sticks to the first written story based on faith with no investigation of its validity whatsoever.
And in a discussion about creationist being unfair, this seems to be a very unfair statement.
I might point out that Sir Isaac Newton was a religious person and even Charles Darwin started from a religious standpoint. The starting points of their investigations were spurred by their desire to explain a world they believed was created by a supernatural God.
Virtually every scientist prior to 1900 was a religious person and there are currently many religious people who are scientists. Many of these people "investigate" the circumstances of our world in an attempt to explain the origins of the Universe and the beginnings of life. It is not true that no one of faith is involved in scientific investigation of the origins of the Universe or life. Many religious people who are not scientists see the genesis story as an allegorical account which as Barbi, herself, points out is so simplistic that even a child can understand it.
My feeling is that if God had actually told Moses and Moses had written down the exact full details of the creation, not only would Moses not have understood it, neither would anyone else -- even today. And, it seemed to me that a later post by Barbi suggest a similar feeling – at least to the point that we are still unable to understand or explain the origins of either.
Iceaura said:
we have a political faction of great power and essentially unlimited funding that benefits from isolating and stigmatizing the entire intellectual class
I am trying to figure out here if you are referencing organized labor or the occupoopers. Well, probably not the occupoopers because they are not of great power and unlimited funding other than they rely upon taxpayers to clean up the messes they leave behind.and
and:
It's not the creationists' bias that is criticized here, but their behavior: they don't play fair. They never have. And people who do play fair seem to end up outside the creationists' camp in short order.
I have not seen any "unfair" tactics used by creationist mentioned here other than Bill O’Reilly apparently cutting off Richard Dawkins on his show. I am not all that convinced that O’Reilly is an outspoken creationist other than when speaking with a non-creationist. If he is speaking with a creationist, he is highly likely to take a non-creationist role. O’Reilly is an equal opportunity interrupter. There more conservative commentators who are far more interruptive than O’Reilly when dealing with liberals while over there on CNN we can find liberal commentators who are equally disruptive of the comments of conservative viewpoints. My point is that if it is unfair tactics by one faction, it is equally unfair when deployed by a different faction. (See Arthur’s comment included below.)
Aristarchus said:
Creationists don't have to play fair .. we have God on our side.
Not much to add to that.
Arthur Angler said:
Let us say I only got caught ONCE cheating on a test- does that make me a bad guy?
Perhaps, but the way the local (TSF) community works, I think if this was the final (and only) exam they would be complaining because they failed the course.
And:
That's another thing- Dawkins is a militant atheist, but somehow, HIS pre-existing bias is okay, while those of believers is not- a double standard if ever there was one.
This is the comment I referenced above. There is a lot of double standarding that goes on here.
Kojax said:
Science is a better truth finding system than religion.
Well, it depends on what truth you are looking for. If you are looking for truth about anything that is not naturalistic, it is the worst possible system for finding those truths. The focus of religion is not to discover or express scientific truths, but spiritual truths. Science totally ignores spiritual truths and then claims itself to be the better. Religion does not ignore the natural, it is some in the natural community who ignore the spiritual.
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There was a long discussion above concerning global warming and, as usual, the participants were discussing two different issues.
There is no arguing that the Earth is in the midst of a climatic change. Does anyone even consider that the Earth is always in the midst of a climatic change? We DO seem to be involved in a period of climatic warming of the Earth’s surface. So what? It's happened before and it will happen again.
The controversy arises over the question as to the effect of human practices on this climatic change. The observation of a result (global warming) has no intrinsic information which suggests the cause. The Earth has heated up and cooled off numerous times in its past including millions of years during which humans were not even present. And such changes have occurred when humans were here but not using fossil fuels.
The political factions attempting to show that humans are the cause are, generally, aligned with business factions which will benefit from legislation designed to curb emissions of certain chemicals into the air.
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There is also, throughout the thread, the lashing out against alleged tactics of creationism which is probably not a real challenging opponent in scientific discussion. Tactics neither prove nor disprove a position. They only enhance or decrease the acceptace of that position whether or not it is accurate. The people who are actually challenging current science on origin of the Universe and origin of life and macro evolution are the intelligent design community.
Picking on creationism is easy because it does not, at its core, rely specifically on science. Intelligent design, on the other hand, more directly discusses the issues from a naturalistic basis using scientific information from the complexity of living matter to the complexity of the Universe in an attempt to show that they are not the products of random happenstance. ID also challenges the philosophical support for, say Darwinism and neo-Darwinism. What is fascinating is how the naturalistic community completely ignores the philosophical underpinnings of their beliefs.
The idea that "God did it" is not the objective of intelligent design, but is probably a by-product of the ID community since it is the only present alternative to random happenstance. I note that there are very few attacks in this forum on the direct work of intelligent designers other than to attempt to discredit them on a personal basis rather than their findings and conclusions.
Often, if we mention an intelligent designer, he is discredited with a comment such as, "Oh, he is a member of the Discovery Institute," as though membership in a group refutes their information. Perhaps you can suggest that members of the Discovery Institute have a bias toward creationism and intelligent design. But I do not see how this validates or refutes their position any more than membership in the National Academy of Sciences validates or refutes the positions of their members. One might note that there are many scientists who are members of both groups.
Bringing this all back to the OP:
1. Both sides of many of these issues are guilty of unfair practices. It is when we ignore the unfair practices of our favored position that we become as guilty of unfairness as those we are judging unfair.
2. Tactical maneuvers neither prove nor refute the position of the tactician.
Sorry if I did not address your favorite post in this thread.
As an aside, what happened to the preview feature we use to have where we could see how our post looked before we posted it?