Don I have enjoyed this thread immensely. I really admire you and others for stating your/their views. I am not smart enough, clever enough, or articulate enough to really participate or contribute much with the likes on this forum who do have those attributes. The rest of my remarks are to the forum in general. I do think I see something that I will throw out at the risk of being chewed up or put in a position to defend a position that is still solidifying in my mind. Let me start with something that South Jordan Mom said, Aaron: How is religion a tool to discover truth? This to me is a religious question. Because of the nature of this forum, I will try to address this with out getting too religious, if possible. I take SJMÂs question as sincere, but I recognize that some people would like to hear the answer not that they are really interested in the answer per se but they are looking for ammunition to use to tear down with. So I am not going to get in a shooting match over this with anybody. This question is precisely the question I asked myself over 45 years ago. I decided to pray and ask my God how I could recognize the truth or not be deceived. Now bear with me, I am not going to put up my experience as some kind of proof, but I believe it will help me make a point of discussion about science and religion. Being sincere in my quest, I decided to employ a well known religious practice of sacrifice. I went with out eating or drinking for over 24 hours. I do not mention this to feign piety, but many will be aware that it is somewhat common for a starving person to have hallucinations. Native Americans used the same technique as have other cultures. I had a personal religious experience that answered my question for me, and for over 45 years have been able to test my answer in different ways so that I am satisfied that, for me, it was a good experience. HereÂs the problem. In religious experiences like this there always seems to be a dichotomy; two plausible explanations. Did I have a hallucination or did I have a true religious experience? Another part of the problem is the knowledge I feel I gained is not transferable. It is kind of like the plumaria tree that grew in my front yard in Waikiki. It had the most heavily fragrant flowers. Can you smell it? Oh! It is so wonderful. It doesnÂt smell like a rose, but it is sweet. A carnation smells bitterer than a rose, but a plumeria is the most wonderful thing to smell. Can you smell it? The knowledge is not transferable, you have to experience it. It seems to me that there are at least two domains here as far as our sinces go, and I can not defend this with any eloquence. In my opinion there is a physical domain and there are other domains one of which we may label spiritual. Millions of people declare that they since things in the spiritual domain. I work at Dugway Proving Ground and we have all kinds of instruments to detect all manner of things in the physical domain. It seems like most everything is censing vibrations at some level. I have seen masspectrometers (sp?) heat up a substance to vapor and sniff it in then display some chemical signatures of what the substance was composed of but I know of no instrument that will detect in the spiritual domain; nor can I prove to anyone there is a spiritual domain other than to say I since it. But other people do since it and in comparing notes we have very similar experiences. You want to talk about duplication? If a hundred or a thousand other people starved for a time and prayed about how to know the truth how many would get the same answer I did? Would South Jordan Mom get the same answer if she tried it? I would guess that none of them would get precisely the same result I did, and a goodly number may even say it was not a good experience. Science will never be interested in the spiritual domain until they get an instrument they can use to test in that domain. For now the only way to test in that domain is something within us. It is a personal thing, and it is not transferable and many claim they donÂt have it. If there is a way to test in the Intelligent Design arena, I would be interested in hearing about it. Jim G "Don J. Colton" <djcolton@piol.com> wrote:Jim I am having a hard time making the point that ID is just as testable as blind evolution. If the formation of the cell or a new species is exceedingly improbable the most likely possibility is intelligent design. This does not have to be religion or God. Some people like Zecharia Sitchin, the Sumerian scholar, believe man is a genetically designed primate made, several thousand years ago, by an advanced race that is not very friendly. If an event is exceedingly improbable - it probably never happened. As a side note, I have been involved in oil exploration for over 25 years and I have seen numerous geological theories fall by the wayside in that time. Geologists (at BYU and Utah) in the 1960's were adamantly opposed to continental drift and would essentially heckle anyone who gave it credence as I witnessed at a presentation made at BYU. Continental drift is now the accepted theory. So much for objective science. In the late 1930's numerous geologists had written off the Saudi Arabian peninsula as containing oil. How wrong can you get? More recently, geologists, who had studied the mountain west extensively, were adamant that there was no oil in central Utah. A small oil company, Wolverine Gas & Oil, drilled a well (contrary to all conventional wisdom) near Richfield, Utah and made the biggest onshore oil discovery in 30 years. -----Original Message----- From: utah-astronomy-bounces+djcolton=piol.com@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:utah-astronomy-bounces+djcolton=piol.com@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Jim Gibson Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2005 3:44 PM To: Utah Astronomy Subject: RE: [Utah-astronomy] science and religion Don I can empathize with what you say. Anyone who has written more than one computer program (and therefore is advanced) knows that you always go back and steel code and mutate. The problem as I see it in relation to the current discussion is the evolutionary process MAY be testable, seeable, understandable, or duplicatable while the ID version doesn't currently have the same attributes from what I can tell. My current beliefs allow for ID, but if it doesn't have any of the above attributes, how can it be taught except in Sunday School? Jim G. "Don J. Colton" wrote: Rich How would an advanced race create another species? They would use existing species and genetic manipulation to create a new species. So in Intelligent Design versus blind evolution the question is, which is more probable, that through the history of life genetic manipulation has occurred through intelligent design or have random events caused the creation of various life forms. This can be addressed by probability and statistics. That's where David Berlinski and other mathematicians come into the argument. Their claim is that blind evolution is wildly improbable and that some other mechanism or intelligent design is far more probable. -----Original Message----- From: utah-astronomy-bounces+djcolton=piol.com@mailman.xmission.com [mailto:utah-astronomy-bounces+djcolton=piol.com@mailman.xmission.com] On Behalf Of Richard Tenney Sent: Tuesday, August 09, 2005 2:05 PM To: Utah Astronomy Subject: RE: [Utah-astronomy] science and religion A big amen Chuck. It should also be pointed out that the fossil record, by definition, will always be grossly incomplete -- the process of fossilization only occurs for a tiny fraction of life forms. For example, we've never found a fossil chimp (as far as I know). And human fossils are quite rare -- it seems the greater the intellect, the less likely they are to get mired in quicksand or tar or whatever. But weigh in DNA, observable mutations in the lab (and in fossils where mitochondrial DNA from fossils can be easily studied), obvious (under our very noses) evidence of the lines of speciation blurring (ligers and mules for example), thousands of examples in the plant kingdom where it's impossible at times to tell where one species stops and the other starts -- these are observable facts (observable because in the microbial realm you can breed thousands of generations in mere days). There are countless clear indicators in our physiology that argue for common ancestry among a wide variety of life forms, structural, chemical, reproductive, neurological, functional, etc. All mammals for example (whales, mice, horses, pigs, humans) have analogous bones structures (five digits per limb, a pair of femurs, etc.). One of the things that I find fascinating is that the whole history of the evolutionary process appears to be mirrored in our own developmental cycle. We start life as a single cell. That divides and divides (in a [salt] watery environment) from formless blastocyst to embryo (replete with tail and gill-like structures, at times indistinguishable from other life forms), to finally a human shape at emerges from the watery womb into the dry air. I find such clues a big wink from the Creator. ;o) BTW, a great read on the study of mitochondrial DNA can be found in the book "The Seven Daughters of Eve" by Bryan Sykes. -Rich --- Chuck Hards wrote:
Aaron, respectfully, if one does not follow scientific principals, one cannot be a scientist, and to invoke deity as part of a technical solution is to clearly set science aside.
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