Trooth Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> bornagaindad Wrote:
>
> >
> > 1. No we did not discuss Mars but there is a
> > discussion here
> >
>
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11642-climat
>
> > e-myths-mars-and-pluto-are-warming-too.html
> > Science embraces evidence and discussion so Im
> > glad you asked.
> >
> > 2. Neither my Dad nor I deny or question the
> > existence of God.
> >
> > I was curious as to why he would selectively
> > choose when to believe science and when not to
> > believe science.
>
>
> 1. Not sure what your point is. This article
> doesn't come to any conclusions and just putters
> around the issue of warming on Mars.
>
> 2. Questioning is good. We should all question
> the existence of God. I believe He is cool with
> that. If someone comes the conclusion after
> seeking God that He does not exist, so be it.
> It's the tyrannical atheists who seek to force
> their views on the other 80% of us who believe in
> God that are the problem.
>
> Global warming has turned out to be a bunch of
> junk science with a polticial/economic agenda. I
> remember when the oceans were going to die by the
> year 2000 if we didn't act immediately in the
> 1970's. That ended up being a lie. Now we've
> heard the same thing about global warming.
>
> Blindly believing anything is dangerous, be it
> religion or science. Selecting what to believe in
> is fundementally human. You imply that we must
> believe all scientists if we're to believe any
> scientists. That is a deductive fallacy and thus,
> illogical.
This is the typical kind of meandering BS that we aways get from the religious crowd
There is a fundamental difference between religion and science.
Religion starts with a random and incompatible story that you happen to be old by an authority figure from which ever country you're in - it could be christian, animist, buddhist, satanist, spiritualist or whatever - it doesn't matter, none of them have any convincing mechanism from distinguishing between the various religions, sects, sub-sects and cults that stands up any attention
Science on, the other hand, starts from what can be physically observed and produces models that explain those observations, Different strands of modeling and explanation start from different places and the job of science is to expand and combine them into a coherent whole - adapting and improving the models in line with the evidence. When a phenomenon turns up that cannot be explained by the models, when two pieces of the whole don't line up neatly or when a prediction about previously unobserved phenomena turns out to be inaccurate - science picks that up as a challenge and looks for the missing pieces.
What that means is that anyone, without having to trust priests or shamans, can pick up any strand of science and follow it through from observations to models and predictions - you can observe radio-active decay in your own lab and use it to estimate the age of materials, you can observe the doppler effect in train whistles, use it to build radar guns and then to estimate the speed of galaxies - not someone else, YOU. You may need to study math past 5th grade and you may have to actually look at the evidence, but anyone can do it - no divine revelation needed
We now understand so much that no single individual can understand it in as much depth as the whole of the scientific and engineering communities - but you can choose the parts that you want to drill drown into, you can look at the whole architecture of science and the world around us - and see the self consistent ideas rippling through that architecture - and you can tie it to the observable evidence as well as the predictions and the level of our confidence in those predictions,
The scientific process and the scientific establishment is very conservative - its very clear at any time about the limits of its explanations and predictions. For example, we can observe that our predictions of quantum mechanics and traditional mechanics really do work in the real world and in the devices we build - chemistry does whet you'd expect it to do and planes don't fall out of the sky, planets don't leave their orbits. However we still don't know exactly how to make the math line up at the two different scales - and hence this is typical of an area of intensive research. One thing we can be pretty sure about is that there are no daemons scribbling the accounts between the scales and moving the pieces around to make sure everything lines up - and it is increasingly clear that there is no 'God-of-the-gaps', that there are no phenomena which require supernatural explanation. When we look at finer and finer resolutions - we see cells, molecules, atoms, quarks and the like - no one has every observed a single angel camping out on a pin head
The fundamental difference between religion and science is that religion claims to be independent of evidence, whereas science actively seeks out evidence, confirmation and contradiction
The process of science is the single most powerful tool mankind has ever created. Science explains the vast majority of the universe that we see around us at ever increasing scales and resolutions.
The trick is not 'selecting what to believe' - its knowing how to apply what can be shown to be true to new problems, getting the data, doing the math. Not asking a shaman, a talk show host or a lobbyist.