From: riggs@descartes.tec.army.mil (Bill Riggs)
Newsgroups: talk.origins,sci.skeptic
Subject: Re: Logic and God (was: Young earth creationist logic NOT!)
Date: 1 Sep 92 16:01:33 GMT
Followup-To: sci.skeptic,talk.origins
Organization: LNK Corporation, Riverdale, MD

In article <87462@netnews.upenn.edu> weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener) writes:
>In article <1992Aug30.045904.20484@hfsi.uucp>, ata@hfsi (John Ata FSO) writes:
>>In article <87306@netnews.upenn.edu> weemba@sagi.wistar.upenn.edu (Matthew P Wiener) writes:
>>>In article <1272@tecsun1.etl.army.mil>, riggs@descartes (Bill Riggs) writes:
>>>>				   Whether Darwin was right or not depends
>>>>quite solely on his ability to have made a calculated scientific 
>>>>wild-ass guess.
>
>>>This is just gibberish.  As a historian, you're an idiot.
>
>>Well, I guess you told him!  Nice, well thought out intellectual
>>conversation here.
>
>That's apparently about the level of intellectual conversation Riggs can
>handle. 
>
>>                    One thing I will say.
>
>One thing I'll say.  You're a newbie.  As most anyone who's been reading
>USENET the past decade could tell you, I plan my posts like chess moves,
>with greater detail often reserved for the second or third round response.
>Sit back and watch for at least six months before commenting on what you
>see going on.
>
>>					    Of the two sides in
>>this argument, one side is polite and tries to honestly convey
>>what they think,
>
>I'm being very polite regarding Riggs' lack of knowledge.  I could
>spell it out in much greater detail, and with great rudeness.  I keep
>it merely on target.  Perhaps you tell me where Riggs was being polite
>in his completely ignorant rejection of a century of scientific research?
>To speak negatively with such complete assurance with absolutely no basis
>in fact is never polite in my book.

	One thing I'll say -

	This guy (and quite a few others) has displayed absolutely NO
idea of where I'm coming from or what I believe, or why. He's set me
up as some kind of straw man and started whacking away - without the
slightest effort to take my views seriously. 

	The semantic style is obvious. By referring to me by my last
name in the post above, he displays the fact that he does not really
respect either my opinions OR my person. Which is fine as far as it
goes, as long as we all understand the underlying power relationship
here. 

	I play chess myself - not to a great degree of skill, but it
always amazes me when I play a good player, and I make a move that he
hasn't planned for, which completely throws him off his game. 
(You can JUST SEE the annoyance of my opponent who finds that the
inferior player has the AUDACITY to make a move that he hasn't
planned for !)

	Some of the criticisms of the position I've taken were valid,
some were merely argumentative. Reminds me of the old Howell Heflin
saying, "If you've got the facts on your side, argue the facts. If you've
got the law on your side, argue the law. If you have neither, (I can't 
quite recall what comes next)". The problem is not that evolution
does not have either facts or logic to support it, but that the proponents
of the same have no tolerance for debate.

	There was another posting in which the poster stated that
religion was neither natural nor physical, but supernatural and
metaphysical. THIS is what we are, in fact, arguing about. A religion
that is both supernatural and metaphysical, is simply a false
religion, incapable of any validity or force in this world. In order
to be "true religion", the divine must, by definition, be capable of
physical action in this world at some level. While the spiritual dimension
of existence is, to some extent, metaphysical, divorcing that spiritual
dimension from what really happens in the real world is the source of
all heresy.

	I'm sorry that I cannot be of greater assistance to those
who find the gap between their spiritual needs and their perception
of reality. There is a problem here, and neither modern science
nor modern religion appears to be heading in a direction which
resolves the conflict. A skeptical attitude is useful in keeping the
noise down, but there are too many persons on both sides of the
argument who have bought into partial solutions, and see no need to
go further. This is probably fine to do engineering problems and 
teach college classes in philosophy and theology, but it completely
invalidates the usefulness of religion to solve real problems in the
real world. The real problem with Creation Science is not that it is
bad science, but that it tends to focus religious faith on basically
imponderable and unprovable questions.

	But is creationism bad science ? I am convinced that one can
take the exact same set of data that exists now, and by changing the
fundamental assumptions on which the theory is based, come up with a
different conclusion. My assertion of this has really sent the people
who care about this stuff into orbit. But coming from a "soft sciences"
background as I do, I'm really saying nothing that psychologists,
sociologists, and political scientists do not have to deal with when
encountering incomplete and often complex data. Can evolutionary
biology really be so simple that we can teach it to high school
students without losing something in the process ?

	I am really bemused by the statement that I'm an ignorant
historian. Since semantics have been thrown my way, I would simply
like to point out that the preponderence of evidence for evolution
does not lie in any written record (that is, after all, what
history is based upon), but on physical evidence/observation and
deductive logic. How, then can we justify evolutionary biology as
a "historical science". Just because something allegedly happened
in the past does not make it history.


	If the natural science community has problems with this,
I'm sorry. Serves you all right for teaching statistics to 
historians and philosophers, who then become "social scientists".


	Bill R.

	"My opinions do not represent those of my employer or any
government agency."

-- 
Bill R.
Newsgroups: talk.origins