You should believe what is demonstrably true.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/beta/evolution/intelligent-design-trial.html

You have yet to pose a challenge.

Your own lack of comprehension preempts any possibility in this regard.
I advise you read these books until comprehension follows then you can reengage in this discussion with the proper tools at hand.

The Age of the Earth
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0804723311/thetalkorigin-20/

Evolutionary Biology
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0878931899/thetalkorigin-20/

Origins: A Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0671459392/thetalkorigin-20/

Seven Clues to the Origin of Life: A Scientific Detective Story (Canto)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0521398282/thetalkorigin-20/

Energy and the Evolution of Life
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0716718499/thetalkorigin-20/

The last one deals with the energy question handily.

ID is not science, it is really that simple.

How does someone gather data to support the conclusion of irreducible complexity?

Its an argument from ignorance thus instead of being based on evidence, its based on the lack of evidence, "I do not know how this came to be, I am such a smart person if there was a way I would have figured it out by now, I havent, thus its irreducible complex." Bollox!

The real science comes into play when data is uncovered, or recorded that then shows how evolution would act to allow an organism to make use of partial systems such as the bacterial flagella making use of several of the components of the motor system currently found.

Nature is full of examples of this; genetics and most especially evo devo has unraveled many of the mysteries of how simple changes in genes, and even in the timings of development can have dramatic effects on an organism. Proteins are macromolecules with a vast array of functionality, and to discount without evidence the capabilities of a given set of organic machinery is not science.

That movie is one giant appeal to emotion, ad hominum attacks, and gotcha quote mines. Truly and marvelously pathetic.

I saw it, it was extremely funny, I do not think it was intended to be a comedy however.

Herbs may have active ingredients, please understand the difference between ANYTHING with active ingredients, and homeopathy.

One has chemical compounds which have been shown to react. (perhaps in ways unexpected due to the lack of significant well structured and properly blinded trials)

The other has purposefully been diluted to the point where no active compound other then plain old water exists.

Homeopathy, there is literally nothing to it . . .

The whole, "I don't trust big phrama becuase money is involved gambit" is really pretty lame.

Careers in science are made by making examples of bad science. That is not to say that most trials end in a positive true conclusion. They don't. Preliminary trials are extremely poor at arriving at the truth. Most truth is arrived at via MANY MANY MANY small or medium trials, having meta analysis performed, trends analyzed, and several large trials spawned from this data, and only then a proper conclusion reached if you get consistent and confirming data to back it up.

For science to uncover truth takes time, and mistakes are made along the way, but the method and the system are self correcting, for every example of fraud or bad science out there you will find 10 examples of the self correction that leads to truth and subsequent innovation. Its psudo-science that is dangerous, it gets pushes based on appeals to emotion and personal experience, it abuses the cognitive bias of humanity, its the snake oil salesman that never cites his research.

Seriously, if you care then follow the sciencebasedmedicine blog. Proper medical researchers spend quality time to help educate the public.

Its a personal decision the standards we each create for the justification of beliefs.

I feel a structure that is amenable to demonstrable analysis is a wholly stronger position than one not so well understood or communicated.

Well in mathematics the term rational is distinct. Objective. Knowable. Exact.

Logic is the overarching name of the various systems by which rational conclusions may be reached. (well then there is fuzzy logic, which explains not so accurate things accurately hhehe)

If beliefs are strictly to be based on irrational, illogical structures of thought then only loose approximations are the best you can have, only inaccuracies shall you know, only mixtures shall you have, never shall knowledge by your guide. Rare the person is that experiences life through these strangely colored lenses. The colloquial term is crazy. We all share to some minor degree these structures, but the exception instead of the rule.

Hyper rationality may bore the many but it makes the few, the scientists, all the more accurate.

Amen the diversity of humanity.

Such as the difference between open and closed systems, such as the transfer of energy, and the production of heat as waste energy.

The fact that gravity produces huge amounts of energy, that fusion from the sun through our atmosphere has a net gain of total energy.

That organic chemistry as it meets structural selection is plenty of an impetus for the chaining of larger molecules with ever advancing functionality.

For a proper mathematical equation to be created that could accurately represent the probability of an as yet unknown process is absurd.

To believe that it could . . .

I think he has gone over this in other videos, not sure exactly, but many modern atheists hold to the basic idea that beliefs require rational justification, and he likely can find no rational justification for any given god being someone comes up with, or random super intelligence aka Cthulhu ect . . . Green dragons live in my basement, what have you.

Cross confirmation.

If you have multiple modalities and each gives the same data, then the data has a higher confidence.

Science does not trust any single modality without a great deal of consideration.

An oar is stuck in the water, and it looks bent, you pull it back out and it is clearly not bent. You come to the conclusion that water bends objects that are placed in the water . . . but you have this nagging doubt about your observation, and so you get out of your boat and jump in the water and have your friend push the oar in the water from up above. Here underwater you clearly see that the oar is not bent under water, but above it looks bent again, but now you know that the observation you made above water having the oar look bent under and the observation below making it look bent above share a characteristic. You can have any number of different people go over this experiment over and over with the same results.

You can take a camera which capture light on 2D film plates and see the same effect. Over the course of experimentation we figure out that light itself is bent when passing through water . . . we can pass light thought other transparent materials and find the same phenomena.

This is all confirmation of the scientific kind its objective and demonstrable, and becuase it builds our knowledge like a pyramid where the foundation would crumble or give unpredictable results higher up if the foundation where found to be flawed, where if any future observation was to go against it we would then have to explain how these repeatable observations where originally mistaken and yet demonstrable, or else it would not be strong enough evidence in itself to refute the original.

That is not faith, its construction. Or if your determined to call it faith, then its the kind of faith based on demonstrably true premises. Its the same kind of faith I have that my chair will hold my weight, its the faith that this chair which does not strain under my weight will continue to not strain under my weight where each time I sit down and it continues to not strain under my weight I have reinforced the belief in its integrity. I hardly consider that faith, or perhaps its the non-blind kind of faith . . .

The only faith needed to examine reality, is the faith that reality can be examined and made sense of . . . which is also demonstrable.

I think just the opposite, and that was why I posted it.

I think to claim something does exist, you need a proper definition for it, without said proper definition one should assume non existence.

The video goes into belief, how many poeple come to belief even with such a lack of evidence. I thought it was appropriate given the topic is evidence.

I think the scientific minded of us would merely hold a higher standard to the word knowledge.

By a scientific standard you do not know you healed yourself of anything. You have conjecture with no data to back up said conjecture.


I disagree, what we can go by and should go by is what is demonstrable.

Homeopathy is demonstrably ineffective. It quite literally does nothing. If you dilute a substance until all active ingredients can be safely said to no longer exist, then its just the solution used for dilution.

Statistical significance in any medical trial is set just above the placebo effect, which is where alternative medicine lives (at or below the level of placebo).

Alternative medicine would not be alternative if it was shown in large RCT's to be significant, it would just be called medicine.

RCT = Randomized Clinical Trial.

Most RCT's for CAM (Complementary and Alternative Medicine) show no significance, the ones that do are small and do not have proper controls in place for bias, where such controls are put in place the significant drops down to placebo effect or even below if double blinded as it should be.

Personal experience is subject to many cognitive bias's, over the course of hundreds of years of scientific research we have found ways to remove such bias, and when such bias is removed and a given practice is shown to have no efficacy then it should be abandoned.

A good site to get real facts about CAM is http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/

A brick is sailing through the air toward your head. Do you have free will?

Well you could choose to duck.
You could base your decision on your financial situation and decide not to duck.

Our brains and millions of years of evolution make us good avoiders, and good schemers as well.

We do not know what reality we exist in, we could exist in the reality where the brick just misses us without moving our head at all (we would have to look and trust our senses to know), maybe we live in a reality where the brick will smash our teeth out, or just graze our dome, or . . . so we can make assessments of our reality, we can plan what to do if we live say in reality a), or b), or . . . and avoid an undesirable outcome.

Bricks sailing through the air hitting heads is evitable. We can aviod this, and thus it is not inevitable.

There are those things that are evitable, and inevitable. That each moment has a preceding cause, and that the next moment is based on the preceding causes does not change that some things are still evitable, a mail box does not have free will, and thus it cannot avoid bricks, in fact it cannot know anything, yet we can and if we knew exactly which reality we existed within (every single variable for the whole of existance) then we could know each cause and each effect.

Knowledge is however distinct from ontology (what we know about what is, is not perfect), we have a limited experience of this reality and so we cannot know exactly which reality we are in and can only plan so many different patterns based on that knowledge. We cannot avoid every outcome, however quite a lot can be avoided.


This is a compatibilist perspective.

Free will is compatible with determinism. Physics backs up this idea in every case considered deeply enough.

Determinism no more breaks free will, then does no determinism. A world with indeterminate, or even no causes has no more foundation for free will then does a deterministic world, after all in order to duck the brick you must first determine you will need to duck the brick.

Homeopathy and alternative medicine does not equal natural healing IMHO.

A good example is acupuncture. We can take a control group that gets sham acupuncture where either the needles aren't really needles and/or also are not placed on the spots (meridians) called for in the "alternative medicine" practice and get the same results that hover at placebo effect.

Should we call that natural healing, I am curious?

I withhold opinion on topics I myself either a) have no direct demonstrable evidence to base an opinion on, or b) expertise that would allow circumstantial evidence to prop up a plausible scenario.

ie, the only good answer is the honest answer . . I don't know, not I find it likely, not I find it unlikely, for even the probabilities require justifications that cannot be honestly made.

One single fact prevents me from taking eye witness accounts of really anything very seriously . . . memory and indeed conscious experience is a fabrication from stimulus. That is why demonstrability is such a keen aspect of science.

Nope, you didn't get it at all. Observations are distinct from the conclusions about the observations.

Being trust worthy to reproduce an account of an observation is wholly different then being capable of creating a plausible and possibly correct conclusion.

Pilots can make an observation of a phenomena, and be completely incapable of having the required expertise to analyze the observation to create a valid conclusion.

I would posit belief in little greens aliens has as a requisite the lack of expertise to come to the conclusion that is reached.

This is a science and philosophy forum, it saddens me to see so little science and philosophy discussed here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvJZQwy9dvE

Do you understand the point I am making?

Take an oar, place it in the water, it looks bent.

If you said it is bent you would be wrong, if you said it looks bent you would be right. One is a conclusion based on an observation the other is just a detail of an observation.

Its the conclusions that should be doubted even if the witness is to be trusted.

Faith is the belief in a proposition without evidence. Faith is lazy, its unreasonable and uncompromising, its the last thing I would consider virtuous.

Supernatural censorship . . . yea sure, I really shouldn't be surprised what people will believe.

Are you kidding me, Christianity is all about bundling up your sins, piling them on to a scapegoat (in this case Jesus) and executing them/him. Jesus was the ultimate scapegoat, the ultimate blood sacrifice of the ultimate death cult.