Look man, all I know is that the tide goes in, the tide goes out, never misses a beat.
You just can't explain that!
They Might Be Scientists
- Thread starter MikeD
- Start date
You just can't explain that!
all this for pointing out that what was previously "known" as scientific fact is constantly changing? wow...and I'M the preacher of dogma? i didn't say that scientific advancement is bad, i'm just pointing out how the agnostic crowd always points to science as some kind of stable rock of fact and reason while said rock eventually crumbles under the weight of the newest discovery.
and mmike..my disdain for academics who never leave the campus has no correlation to my understanding of basic biological principles, or at least that's what my gpa says. i suppose my A's in biology, botany, and zoology clearly indicate that i was unable to take in, understand, and regurgitate the scientific principles of those silly courses.
the "activists" comment was a joke that apparently no one looked deep enough to get. hint: what demographic, of which we are currently discussing, tends to get married at an early age? what would be the polar opposite of that demographic? geez guys...i feel like i just dropped some british humor on a room full of nascar fans.
Actually not true. This is a debate I often have with detractors of eastern medicine. Science is ONE tool we have for building knowledge, but we also have trial and error and intuitive learning (and probably others that I can't think of or don't know about), both of which lead to bodies of objective knowledge. They may not be rigorous in the same way the scientific method is, but they have also produced knowledge that science couldn't or hasn't yet.
Again....your answer is very telling. The fact that you view school as ingesting and regurgitating facts means that you have missed the point of school entirely. And you are of course not alone. I know a kid (who used to work for me) who made it out of university with a mechanical engineering degree, worked in industry for....three years by that point I think, and didn't know what a cotter pin was. Wait...I think I may have just started arguing your side.and mmike..my disdain for academics who never leave the campus has no correlation to my understanding of basic biological principles, or at least that's what my gpa says. i suppose my A's in biology, botany, and zoology clearly indicate that i was unable to take in, understand, and regurgitate the scientific principles of those silly courses.
Be that as it may....the goal of university education is to teach you how to learn. Critical thinking is another bonus. Those who just go through the motions to pass their exams are really missing out. And my GPA was FAR from stupendous.
And to return to the debate at hand, someone armed with the ability to learn and critical thinking, most likely will figure out that religion isn't really required to explain the mysteries of the universe. There is plenty that science hasn't figured out yet. No-one denies that. But the write it off as "....and therefore this bizarre thing is due to god's will"....that's just silly.
The scientific method crumbles under the weight of scientific discoveries? Huh?
Last edited:
And there is plenty of tainted science out there. (heh heh ....tainted)
The whole autism-vaccine thing come to mind....just one of many examples, sadly.
I think these two sum it up nicely.
While I got that this was a joke, and in fact chuckled a bit, I can only imagine your reaction if teh
had a member who was openly as much a conservative Muslim as you profess to be Christian, and made a similar crack about unmarried teens.
I suck at the paint shop. Sorry Manimal. Once again, couldn't resist.
Attachments
Both of which have no place at all in the stated 'scientific method' terminology taught in like 6th grade
You asked for that one.
yeah.......not really how that works.........at all actually.manimal said:
And please don't ever quote a zoology class as part of your scientific credentials. I'm doing you a favor by asking this.
hey man...it was easy and i had to have something to contrast the beast that is research methods
While I got that this was a joke, and in fact chuckled a bit, I can only imagine your reaction if teh
are you assuming that i'd be upset or something?
sure..teaching students how to learn and think critically is a primary focus of courses where there are gray areas such as in law, business ethics, history, etc. but the structure of basic college science courses require that you HAVE to be able to take in, memorize, and regurgitate the information without any room for gray areas. i don't recall having to use much critical thinking when memorizing the difference between mitosis and meiosis but i used a ton of critical thinking while writing a 23 page history research project on the local government during the civil rights movement.
it's ok mmike..i know you can only see me in one light; i mean really, how could someone be educated AND believe in a deity? that's just crazy talk
It's not about gray areas. It's about REALLY understanding the material.sure..teaching students how to learn and think critically is a primary focus of courses where there are gray areas such as in law, business ethics, history, etc. but the structure of basic college science courses require that you HAVE to be able to take in, memorize, and regurgitate the information without any room for gray areas. i don't recall having to use much critical thinking when memorizing the difference between mitosis and meiosis but i used a ton of critical thinking while writing a 23 page history research project on the local government during the civil rights movement.
it's ok mmike..i know you can only see me in one light; i mean really, how could someone be educated AND believe in a deity? that's just crazy talk
I fully admit that I could not solve a second order differential equation anymore to save my life. However, I still retain the principles of mechanical vibrations, heat transfer and fluid mechanics. As we all know by now, I work with helicopters. Vibration tends to be a fairly big thing with them. I still apply things that I learned in 1994 to what I do at work today.
At a high school level, yes science classes are pretty "regurgitory based". But go beyond that level and lo and behold, there begins to be a reason behind all of these things. Your experience is limited to what is relatively low-level science courses. (the fact that you're using mitosis as an example shows this). I'm telling you, you have not experienced "higher level" science education. So again, you aren't qualified to make a call on its worth, or how "science" works.
This is whole thing is a total digression from the discussion.
Basically, I don't weigh in on whether and AR-15 Glock is better than an M-16 Glock (anyone see what I did there?). I don't know anything about the subject matter. I'm just saying that maybe you could do the same.
Last edited:
False. There are plenty of gray areas in biology alone (for instance, even at the most basic level, there is no consensus definition for what is a "species" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Species_problem) and there are similar issues in all the sciences at all levels. It surprises me that you weren't exposed to this in the 3 introductory biology courses you took. This illustrates MMikes point pretty well, honestly.
I actually had to google "critical thinking" after reading this post because so far as I know that's just a stupid buzzphrase with no real meaning. Wiki says:
It seems you're confusing "critical thinking" and "gray area" with having the ability to interject your own opinion on a given topic in a research paper. If you're using critical thinking in the context of being given a bunch of info and properly using it to solve problems, then I fail to see how this doesn't apply to science.
to get back on topic...does the scientific method differ from 100 level to graduate level courses? < --- serious question.
i never claimed to be a science guru, just that i've had enough exposure to understand that science is ever changing and, to tie it in all the way back to westy's fixed post, that ideas once thought of as scientific fact are now laughed at in the light of new evidence/discovery.
and yes...i am rather impressed with your GLOCK cleverness
and jonkranked..the first line of your pic is flawed in regards to christian doctrine (i'll let you try and figure out what is incorrect).
No, but then again I don't recall alot of discussion on the scientific method in the classes you listed. General biology tended to cover basic cellular functions, structure of DNA, history of life, etc. Zoology and Botany pretty much concentrated on taxonomy, phylogeny and natural history. Id like to recommend a book to you that's very thorough and easy to read. I will actually send you a copy if you'll read it.
http://www.amazon.com/Demon-Haunted-World-Science-Candle-Dark/dp/0345409469
It's not a religion basher or anything like that.
.
Information changes, the scientific method does not change. I think that's the disconnect here. The method allows us to observe, interpret and contextualize changes to information we have. Nobody has said every scientific finding was "rock solid". Even if what we currently accept turns out to be false, we still have the comfort of knowing that falsehood was based on the best info we had.
You know what you call alternative medicine that's passed double-blind experiments?
The fact that you think this is weakness shows the class that you have totally and utterly missed the point.
that's the way it's supposed to work but the problem is that, like religion, many in the scientific community, or perhaps the politico-scientific community, parade around with extrapolated "evidence" as fact to bash the religious community and then quickly become silent when the evidence no longer supports their agenda.
please read my above post very carefully
Example?
You had to know this would happen.
What if I post some nun porn?
You're new here, aren't ya?
here's the difference:
science: changes and updates itself based on new discoveries/technologies/understandings/etc, corrects its past mistakes, and continues its progress
christianity: adamant in its beliefs as they were laid out in a 2000 year old book written by a bunch of drunks.
would you go to a doctor that was practicing medicine from a 2000 year old medical journal? i sure wouldn't
does it really matter?and jonkranked..the first line of your pic is flawed in regards to christian doctrine (i'll let you try and figure out what is incorrect).
My karma ran over your dogma.
My dogma peed on your karma's tires.My karma ran over your dogma.
Medicine.
Eastern medicine is just one example of a body of knowledge developed by a method other than the scientific one, and I acknowledge a contentious one since it has an awful lot of culture and subjectivity mixed in there.
Another example is that most innovation is based on knowledge developed via intuitive knowledge. Intuition is faster and better able to handle complexity than scientific and academic methodologies, but it is also higher risk and not repeatable. To put it another way, intuition is generally responsible for most groundbreaking hypotheses, and then the scientific method (or trial and error) is responsible for verifying and deconstructing those hypotheses. It takes a different kind of knowledge to make those intuitive leaps, but it's still knowledge.
Anyway, none of those three have much to do with religion. I bring it up because, I think that when people begin to insist that the only type of "real" knowledge is scientific, they are closing their possibilities for learning and beginning to sound dogmatic themselves.
also, there is a hypothesis that psychedelic plants jump started conscious thought in humans
god was a hippy nudist tree hugger
And you're going to test that hypothesis how, exactly...? Seems quite deliberately unprovable.
I also gotta wonder about the "theory" Kevin cites that the world would be better off without religion, because historical causation is a decidedly thorny philosophical problem, and certainly nothing that can be tested in a way as to make it a theory. Sounds more like me in high school, pissed-off and cynical and railing about the evil and stupidity of "organized religion" while cranking up my NIN Pretty Hate Machine cassette, or maybe my Ministry Psalm 69...
Not that people don't do hideous things under the aegis of organized religion, but there's no way to determine any kind of "true cause" based on historical evidence (mostly text). Even the counter-factual is kinda useless, IMHO. And for every religious cause you can name, there are economic or political elements that could arguably be just as contributory, or even primary to what people cover with a veneer of "religion."
Religion can be a tool of control, and it can be rigid, and it can be dogmatic and ignorant of its own history and encoding as text written by humans. And I'm not arguing for all religion being a good thing. But some religions/religious people (a minority, but good/smart people are a minority in all arenas) are about exploration of their own religion and the world around them, not about telling others what to do or forwarding a particular political agenda based on a mis- or overly-literal interpretation of the historical documents that constitute their particular religion's textual makeup.
I just don't dismiss religion out of hand anymore, even though I'm an atheist. People writ large suck donkey balls, so we have to expect religion to reflect that.
frisbee full of magic mushrooms. can ya help a brotha out?
and black....or was that jesus?