Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Burp!


This is Beep! Beep! It's Me!'s Darwin Fish entry in the "Your chance to be an intelligent designer!" competition. Great, isn't it?
Meanwhile....
"He stopped short of endorsing intelligent design, but said scientific and philosophical reason must work together in a way that does not exclude faith.
"But it is also true that the theory of evolution is not a complete, scientifically proven theory."
Benedict added that the immense time span that evolution covers made it impossible to conduct experiments in a controlled environment to finally verify or disprove the theory.
"We cannot haul 10,000 generations into the laboratory," he said."
Dr Dan Johnson, Professor of Environmental Science at the University of Lethbridge, wrote the first resolution by a Canadian scientific society against the teaching of intelligent design in schools,
Recently he made the following comment on DeSmogBlog in response to a climate change denier, but his lesson on what constitutes a theory applies equally well to the pope's statement.
Take it away, Dr Dan! :
"Theory means a body of knowledge surrounding the science. It doesn't mean a guess or something to be proven.
The idea that 'first you have an observation, then a hypothesis, then a theory, then it graduates to proven" is nonsense, and not what you would call any kind of good science. That is the definition of "theory" that might be in a newspaper or grade school years ago, but it is not what theory means.
"Number theory" doesn't mean we are not sure there are numbers, like maybe 42 has not been proven. "Evolutionary theory" doesn't mean we are not sure that species gave rise to other species over long earth history (why do I just know that you don't agree there?).
"Gravitational theory" doesn't mean that I might float."
Here endeth the lesson.

6 comments:

West End Bob said...

Class dismissed . . . .

Anonymous said...

Well, that was sneaky: I see the "God of the Gaps" has been inserted into the gaps in philosophy instead of science.
Not really a very good strategy considering all the gaps in the bible.

beepbeepitsme said...

Hey, thanks for the heads up. :)

Dan L. Johnson said...

Is anyone up for a sandwich?

The atheist's nightmare: the banana
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9zwbhAXe5yk

The Peanut Butter argument against the Theory of Evolution
http://www.glumbert.com/media/peanutbutter

Mike said...

I love that banana one, since it basically proves evolution...really funny stuff.

Dan L. Johnson said...

Right on.

Busy Guy - the Intelligent Designer especially loves houseflies, mites, lice, mosquitoes, aphids, blackflies, bugs and the like. When they encounter insecticides, the Big ID'er rushes in and makes the next generation of crawly less susceptible, for over 500 species so far. How can we not respect that kind of care for fuzzy little animals?

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