Science Minister won't confirm belief in evolution

[llama64]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

A Christian can hold the post of Minister of Science. The problem is that you always hope that ministers given a certain post or portfolio will have some understanding of the issues, how they impact society, how they are relevant to each other, etc.

The problem with the minister not answering the question is that you begin to question and doubt if he really is knowledgeble enough to handle the post with responsibility and execute it intelligently with the requisite knowledge and acceptance of the principles that it deserves.

It's like hearing that you have a finance minister who says that he won't confirm if he believes in banking because lending with interest is against his religious beliefs.

Well said.

I don't care that we have a Christian in this post. What I do care is that we have a Christian who is dodging a basic question while hiding behind his beliefs.

Unfortunately the Conservative party is ruled by a faction of highly religious social conservatives. It's not surprising we have an assumed creationist as the Minister of Science given the makeup of the party.

Hopefully this faction will lose it's power base in the future, but until then our country will be held back, scientifically at least.

[peter12]

Originally Posted by mykalberta

Hahaha, yes I am sure he is suspicious of science. Those University attending Chiropracters and their non science University.

Maybe he is suspicious of scientists that waste public money on bonehead experiments because they are unable to make it in the private sector without government funding.

Public funding is essential to the advancement of science. What sort of bone-headed experiments are you talking about?

EDIT: On the matter of the thread, sadly the "skeptics" of evolutionary theory are slowly pervading the conservative political movement in this country. As a principled and (hopefully) intelligent conservative myself, I see this as being very serious.

[troutman]

Originally Posted by Daradon

From what I've read they cannot unless conditions are perfect. Reminds me of a Steven Baxter novel I read where eventually the human race (or whatever it became) was forced to create stars and energy by mining the deepest black hole type centers of galaxies. And that only extended their time in the universe, eventually everything did decay due to entropy.

Thanks. I just bought Spin by Robert Charles Wilson:

http://www.amazon.ca/gp/product/0765...pf_rd_i=915398

One night the stars go out . . .

[MoneyGuy]

Originally Posted by troutman

Prove it.

Prove him wrong.

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by T@T

if he can't answer a simple question of his beliefs in the field, spin it anyway you want but true christians do not believe in true evolution. Like the pope, they always spin it back to god starting it.

That's another really annoying thing, the conflagration of evolution with abiogenesis.

One is the process in which organisms change over time. The other is the origin of life. The catholic church has stated that evolution is an acceptable mechanism but the origin of life is still creationism. If that's the path of least resistance, that works for me. All the scientific evidence is still there but if you really need to believe, then your faith would be enough. You could always just say maybe god hit that perfect recipe of amino acids with with just the right dash of lightning (because he has mastery over quantum mechanics LOL) and there you go. Fiat Lux! Fiat Life!

I've never understood why conservative christianity (or any religion) has such a problem with stretching this kind of logic and how they can make this into a moral debate or issue. There's no verse in the Bible that says every single thing in it must be read literally and exactly as written down with absolutely no room for interpretation. In fact, some of the greatest tenets of the other two big religions - Judaism and Islam have much of their religion rooted in books or oral histories of discussion and interpretation (Talmud and Hadith)

[peter12]

Originally Posted by llama64

Well said.

I don't care that we have a Christian in this post. What I do care is that we have a Christian who is dodging a basic question while hiding behind his beliefs.

Unfortunately the Conservative party is ruled by a faction of highly religious social conservatives. It's not surprising we have an assumed creationist as the Minister of Science given the makeup of the party.

Hopefully this faction will lose it's power base in the future, but until then our country will be held back, scientifically at least.

That is absolutely not true.

[Calgaryborn]

Ex-atheist, Lee Strobel said, "Essentially, I realized that to stay an atheist, I would have to believe that nothing produces everything; non-life produces life; randomness produces fine-tuning; chaos produces information; unconsciousness produces consciousness; and non-reason produces reason. Those leaps of faith were simply too big for me to take . . ."

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by troutman

Wouldn't the constant universe go dark, when all the stars burn out? Can stars continue to be born indefinitely?

Universal Heat Death occurs with limitless expansion. Stellar reactions still occur because of the leftover material from the big bang and the relative interaction of all the forces in the universe. If the universe expands indefinetely, eventually everything will be too far apart for anything to happen and yes, literally everything can burn out and entropy into chaos. That's why the Big Crunch idea is emotionally popular because then at least everything goes back into a tiny dough-ball to be thrown into the unversal fryer again to puff up into a delicious Stampede doughnut.

[kermitology]

Originally Posted by MoneyGuy

Prove him wrong.

Ugh..

Unicorns, fire breathing dragons, etc have the same empirical evidence that God does. They are only referenced in text and stories. There is no recorded proof of their existence. The logical conclusion is therefore that they do not and have not existed.

[troutman]

Originally Posted by Calgaryborn

Ex-atheist, Lee Strobel said, "Essentially, I realized that to stay an atheist, I would have to believe that nothing produces everything; non-life produces life; randomness produces fine-tuning; chaos produces information; unconsciousness produces consciousness; and non-reason produces reason. Those leaps of faith were simply too big for me to take . . ."

Blue font - must be right.

[kermitology]

Oh great.. Calgaryborn is here to tar the atheists..

[Hack&Lube]

Originally Posted by Calgaryborn

Ex-atheist, Lee Strobel said, "Essentially, I realized that to stay an atheist, I would have to believe that nothing produces everything; non-life produces life; randomness produces fine-tuning; chaos produces information; unconsciousness produces consciousness; and non-reason produces reason. Those leaps of faith were simply too big for me to take . . ."

To me, people who say things like that make me feel that their imaginations just weren't big enough. I don't have a deep understanding of it, but I can easily see order arising from chaos without a helping hand. Einstein said that God doesn't play dice with the universe but Quantum Mechanics is becoming one of the basic fundamentals of understanding our universe and reality. I'm not saying that you can't believe in God, but it seems a bigger leap of faith to put your trust in human institutions of religion and simply choosing one of them as right and rejecting the rest as wrong and then determining your entire life view upon that belief...but hey, that's why it's called faith.

It's a very innate and human desire to find purpose and order in life. It's a product of evolution (or God if you will).

[photon]

Originally Posted by Calgaryborn

Ex-atheist, Lee Strobel said, "Essentially, I realized that to stay an atheist, I would have to believe that nothing produces everything; non-life produces life; randomness produces fine-tuning; chaos produces information; unconsciousness produces consciousness; and non-reason produces reason. Those leaps of faith were simply too big for me to take . . ."

The argument from personal incredulity is actually a logical fallacy...

[MarchHare]

Originally Posted by Calgaryborn

Ex-atheist, Lee Strobel said, "Essentially, I realized that to stay an atheist, I would have to believe that nothing produces everything; non-life produces life; randomness produces fine-tuning; chaos produces information; unconsciousness produces consciousness; and non-reason produces reason. Those leaps of faith were simply too big for me to take . . ."

Just because he finds an idea to be unpleasant doesn't make it any less true.

I'm shocked that he finds the idea of non-life producing life to be too large of a leap of faith, but he now (apparently) readily accepts as fact the existance of an invisible all-powerful magical space fairy who created everything without there being any evidence whatsoever to support that claim. One would be hard-pressed to find a worse example of intellectual dishonesty than that.

[octothorp]

Originally Posted by Calgaryborn

Ex-atheist, Lee Strobel said, "Essentially, I realized that to stay an atheist, I would have to believe that nothing produces everything; non-life produces life; randomness produces fine-tuning; chaos produces information; unconsciousness produces consciousness; and non-reason produces reason. Those leaps of faith were simply too big for me to take . . ."

Eloquent, but not particularly meaningful.

Nothing produces everything. Complete strawman argument: no knowledgeable atheist argues this; a singularity produces everything. In fact, it's the creationists who argue that matter was created out of nothingness.

Non-life produces life. Why is this so hard to believe? We know that chemical reactions can produce replicating RNA. We know that Proteins replicate, and DNA and proteins together produce replicating, evolving, but stable life. The questionmarks in this process are relatively small.

Randomness produces fine-tuning. The simplest mathematical systems can begin as random and produce self-tuning, replicating patterns. We see our world fine-tuning itself all the time through ecosystem corrections. Again, not hard to believe at all.

Chaos produces information. This one I'm not sure about, because I have no idea what he means by information. Like DNA? I think information is a bad metaphor for DNA because it leads to faulty logic like this, but even so, DNA equivelent RNA can be produced from chemical elements. edit: in an abstract sense, chaos can still be described by information. In fact, the amount of chaos or order has nothing to do with any relationship to information.

Unconsciousness produces consciousness. Consciousness is simply a state of mind, and the mind is simply an extremely complex chemical reaction.

Non-reason produces reason. Well, apparently is doesn't, given the lack of reasonable people we have on our planet. But reason is a human construct, and I don't think our universe was ever less reasonable than it is now; all that's changed is our ability to interpret it.

[T@T]

Originally Posted by You Need a Thneed

Why not?

To save time I'll just refer you to this website for your answers.

http://www.skepticreport.com/creatio...onistshate.htm

[Calgaryborn]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

To me, people who say things like that make me feel that their imaginations just weren't big enough. I don't have a deep understanding of it, but I can easily see order arising from chaos without a helping hand. Einstein said that God doesn't play dice with the universe but Quantum Mechanics is becoming one of the basic fundamentals of understanding our universe and reality. I'm not saying that you can't believe in God, but it seems a bigger leap of faith to put your trust in human institutions of religion and simply choosing one of them as right and rejecting the rest as wrong and then determining your entire life view upon that belief...but hey, that's why it's called faith.

It's a very innate and human desire to find purpose and order in life. It's a product of evolution (or God if you will).

If your imagination is big enough to believe something came from nothing or order from disorder why can't you see the possibility that one religion out of the million plus on this planet might be right or even they are wrong and God is unrevealed? Doesn't current scientific observation conflict with something coming from nothing or order arising from chaos?

There are three possibilities:

1. Everything came from nothing(hardly compatable with science)

2. Stuff has always exist and is merely changeing and becoming more complexed and ordered (means the law of thermal dynamics is wrong)

3. Something beyond our observation made the order we now see(unproveable scientifically)

Being convinced of any of these requires trust in an unknown. Your evolutionary theory and my faith are built on a trust in one of these. One or two is required as a foundation for evolution. Your world view is built upon it. Three naturally is the foundation of my world view. My observation of the natural world is built upon that foundational belief.

[MarchHare]

2. Stuff has always exist and is merely changeing and becoming more complexed and ordered (means the law of thermal dynamics is wrong)

If you're going to pretend that you actually have an understanding of science (which you clearly don't), it would help your ruse if you referred to it by its correct name, thermodynamics.

[T@T]

Originally Posted by Hack&Lube

The catholic church has stated that evolution is an acceptable mechanism but the origin of life is still creationism. If that's the path of least resistance, that works for me.

How many years did it take the Catholic Church to accept that? Fact is they had too, they looked like total idiots in refuting it. If it works for you then great! but it doesn't for me.

[PsYcNeT]

Originally Posted by Calgaryborn

1. Everything came from nothing(hardly compatable with science)

Not completely.

There is a fairly new theory thats making the rounds right now called 'The Big Bounce' wherein the universe has Big Banged and Big Crunched it's way through countless expanding/contracting/re-expanding forms of the universe.

'Nothing' is really just a ball of matter and energy compressed to the point of a singularity.