Aileron

Just because something can't be practically experimented upon doesn't mean that its unscientific. For example, the leading scientific theorey about the extinction of dinosaurs involves the Earth being his with a big meteor. There is a lot of evidence supporting this claim, but in order to do an experiment we would have to find a planet full of dinosaurs and slam an asteroid into it. Intelligent design does have a similar experiment. We would need a planet covered in a lot of primordial chemicals, wait about 50 billion years and check to see if a lifeform spawned out of it. Since that is cleary impossible, the scientific thing to do is rely on the evidence. Relying on observations rather than experimentation does not make the theorey any less scientific. I'd also like to point out that evolution itself is also a religious theorey, because the groundwork was laid by a monk who bred peas in the medieval period (I forget his name, I'm no historian or biologist). May I also point out that he was not tried for heresy, put in prison or anything of the like. Don't forget the biggest hole in evolution. Where did the FIRST life-form come out of? Sure, birds evolved from reptiles, and reptiles evolved from amphibians, but it does not explain how a paramecium evolved out of rocks and water. This doesn't mean evolution is wrong. This only proves that evolution is an incomplete theorey. Evolution explains how life-forms change genetically over time, but not how the first life-form was created. Other than ID, the only other theorey is the Primordial Soup theorey. This theorey states that before life, the Earth was covered in a "primordial soup" of organic chemicals, and that somehow that soup mixed together into a life-form. Now keep in mind what I said about entropy. According to the Law of Entropy, non-homogenious fluids spread out into homogenious fluids. For example, if you sprinkle salt from a shaker into a gl!@#$%^&* of water, over time the crystals will dissolve, and the salt molecules will spread evenly throughout the glass If you sprinkled salt into water, and the crystals instead came together to form one big crystal, that is not entropic, thus you could come to the conclusion that it is unnatural, and if its not natural, it must be artificial, and if its artificial, an intelligent being is messing with your experiment. Ofcourse there could be other explainations for this case. The salt might not be dissolving because the water may have had too much salt in it already, and it might be gathering in one crystal due to pressure. Now take out the salt and put in some adenine, cytosine, guanine, and thymine, the four chemicals that make up DNA, which by the way really aren't found anywhere else in nature that often. Now, these chemicals aren't salts, so they won't really dissolve (please don't ask me what exactly they do in water - I'm not a chemist and do not know), but like every other fluid in the universe they will eventually settle into a even mixture. Now, our observations on the other hand was that instead of spreading out, they condensed into a double helix arrangement that was a properly functioning genetic code. Keep in mind that this code had to be of a lifeform that had to be fully fuctional on its own, had to have some method of reproduction, and that reproduction had to atleast once in a while have a different code that would also be fully functional. The point is that DNA is not just a mere molecule, it is also a correctly compiled piece of programming. The fact that our four acids condensed into a molecule in and of itself seems to violate the Law of Entropy, and the probability of them condensing into a CODED molecule is astronomically small. To the Primordial Soup theorey's credit, the world did have a lot of time to spit out this code. Also to its' credit, once we have the code, it is entropic for the rest of the cell to form around it (provided the code had that as part of its design). Still, the odds of success certainly are much much less than .01%, so we need a new theorey. That's where Intelligent Design comes in, which states no more and no less than we know with atleast 99.99% certainty that the first DNA code was encoded by one or more intelligent beings.

I don't blame Iran for reacting that way. While I could be convinced that Iran might be pursuing nuclear weapons development, if that is their goal they are smart enough not to say it officially. And, CNN's mistake damaged Iran's foreign policy and international image, damage an apology isn't going to undo.

Well, my connection translated to your situation would be going from Houston to Orlando, Orlando to Miami, and Miami to your house. It just doesn't make sense. This computer is closer to New York than Washington...I have no idea why my packets are making a stop in Washington.

I still need a bot coder for MY zone....I've been waiting since August. Not to be mean, but you should probably consider yourself SOL.

Actually its been like this since I got this connection, but it never really was that bad before. Its just gotten about 5 times worse over the past couple days. The trace revealed that my connection goes through New York and Washington when I live in between those two cities. That might be my problem.

Well, the !@#$%^&*le describes it all. My ping and c2s are really low, but my s2c is really high. I am supposedly on a high speed connection to my apartment network. I know I probably have the hardware to have a low s2c, I just don't have it.

Erm...the Inquisition wasn't against science. It was against non-Catholics in the period just after the Moors were expelled from Spain. It wasn't even really as religious as it was cultural. You had a group of people who's country was occupied for centuries and their culture suppressed, and they just fought the occupiers out. What they then wanted to do is re-establish Spainish culture in Spain. Needless to say they went a little overboard. The Church didn't oppress Gallileo. A few men who were appointed to positions they should not have been appointed to abused their power. It was these men, not the Church as a whole, that was oppressive. If one put aside their bias, one would find that over most of history the church supported science, and in some times and places was the only ins!@#$%^&*ution keeping science alive. Well said Astro, but you completely ignored my point. Intelligent Design doesn't start with the conclusion, it starts with the observations. It starts with the observation that life is complex, intricate, and complicated, and that nature tends to gravitate towards the simplist arrangement. This eventually leads to the conclusion that life had to be designed. Take for example the planets. All planets are spherical. They are round due to entropy of gravity. Over time, matter condenses into a sphere because it is the most energy conservative arrangement. If you were flying through space and came accrossed an iron planet in the shape of a cube, one comes to the conclusion that that planet was designed, because the entropic arrangement for planets is spherical. ID is indeed a scientific theorey, because lifeforms are the most unentropic objects known. Things that aren't entropic are usually designed. Thus, it is likely life was designed. Really, ID isn't a theorey at all. Its really a corollary of the Law of Entropy. Now I think I realise what's so hot about this issue. ID doesn't prove Catholicism, Christianity, Judeism, Islam or any other religion. It gives no indication about the designer(s), and infact implies polytheism because every man-made machine that rivals the complexity of the simplist bacteria was designed by a team of engineers. What ID DOES do though is disprove atheism. If life was designed, there would have to be some designer. If that designer was a mere extraterrestrial, some designer would have had to made the extraterrestrial. Thus, there would have to be some intelligent extrauniversal force guiding the course of events. If ID is true, it disproves atheism, and that's what is creating all this fuss. You claim to be scientific and then you quote a philosopher. If you were a true scientist you would have lost respect for philosophy long ago. Note the "von" in this guy's name. That's a !@#$%^&*le. That man was probably a useless piece of nobility who produced nothing in his lifetime. He resorted to philosophy as a means of self-promotion, to make himself seem smart, but if he was smart he would have went into real science and discovered something following generations can use. Needless to say Dietrich got it wrong. Science is man's attempt to explain how nature works. Religion is man's attempt to explain why we don't quite seem to fit in with the natural world around us. Philosophy is for those who understand neither science nor religion, but still want to p!@#$%^&* themselves off as intellectuals.

That is true. There is much more published material on every little pissant attack insurgents make over large national economic and political progress in Iraq. Many on the right call this a left wing bias in the media, though what it really is in this case is just that explosions sell newspapers more than the building of bridges, hospitals, schools, etc. and people hating each other sells more than old enemies hammering out an arrangement to live together. Its probably economic incentive rather than some desire to change the political minds of the public, but to those trying to argue for the right, its disturbing to have to fight the perceptions created by this system. Same thing with the President. "Blunders" sell. A smoothly run operation does not. The only major mistake Bush ever made with Iraq is that he overjustified it. He gave 21 reasons to go to war, but should have only stated the 10 he was sure about and left it at that.

So they used "forces" instead of "ops"...not exactly a major mistake. I guess we should pull forces out of Iraq when the Iraqi government wants us out. We will never be able to aprehend every terrorist and criminal in a country at any given time, so all we can aim for is "stability", which is rather vague. However, in this case it probably means "Until insurgent forces have been weakened enough that Iraqi forces can suppress them without foreign aid." Since Iraq is a sovereign country and the new democratic government is worthy of world respect, it is their decision whether or not they are ready to handle the insurgency on their own.

[OOC]Well, apparently only three people are participating in this topic. I'm trying to get this working, but most of the hardcore rpg players were long gone before this topic started. Erm...note that Thallina still needs a ride to Terra. If Cmdr Rease is gracious enough, maybe he should charter her a flight. [/OOC]

*attempts to shoot myself but can't because I'm being controlled by flamingstarch* (!@#$%^&*...I forgot to put the "don't control the actions of other posters" rule up)

*revives everybody* *vulches Bran Man*

The point still stands that it would be very unlikely to have organic molecules be formed from entirely inorganic molecules. It could easily be possible for a cell to form around a DNA molecule in primordial soup, but what is the probability of a stable DNA molecule making a lifeform that can not only survive, but reproduce and evolve, just making itself? Its like laying a deck of cards on a table, and a catagory 9 earthquake shakes the table. At the end of the earthquake the cards are arranged in a delicate and complex house of cards. Could this happen? Certainly. You have all the components. You have 52 cards and enough kinetic energy to lift up and rotate the cards. Still, if one observes a house of cards, one comes to the conclusion that it was set up by an intelligent lifeform rather than the random shaking of an earthquake. It is simply a matter of probability. The same thing applies to intelligent design. We obserb lifeforms that are more complex than most of our machines. Life is so complex that it is beyond our individual capacity to understand it. For instance, it is impossible for a person to memorize how his or her own DNA works. We need a GROUP of scientists working with a lot of expensive machines just to map DNA. The biggest problem the intelligent design theory faces is its publicist. Some idiot somewhere falsely implied that its a secular version of creationism. It isn't. The conclusion bears some similarities, but the reasoning is completely different. We have a lot of lifeforms. Each one is a biological machine that is far more complex than anything modern humankind can produce. The parts of each of these machines fit together on the molecular level. There are molecules in lifeforms that resemble nothing found elseware in nature, though have similarity to articificially produced molecules made by chemists. Lifeforms move by themselves, and thus bear more similarities to our machines of transportation than any rock or fluid found in nature. Lifeforms are also delicate. If a monkey wrench in thrown into a machine, the machine breaks down. Similarily if some external force prevents the internal workings of a lifeform from functioning, the lifeform dies. It can easily be stated that a lifeform is a biological machine. If life is a machine, could it not also have been made by an intelligent designer like all other machines?

Backtracking a little - but this caught my attention. Not really. It would unscientific to assume that the die was weighted if you couldn't analyse the die. For example, you might also assume that all six sides of the die had the number 5. There also might be some issue !@#$%^&*ociated with the mechanism used to throw the die. A creationist might argue that there is a supernatural force at work. But the theory of evolution is based on much more evidence than just 100 throws of a dice. Every time a new method for testing evolution is invented (eg DNA profiling), the evolution 'theory' still stands. We know for a fact that genes are passed on through generations and that sometimes genes mutate to produce new inheritable traits - it happens every year with the influenza virus. This is fact - not theory. Evolution happens. If it didn't exist then we would never need to worry about bird flu. Yet on the other hand, the conclusion that the die is weighted is certainly not an unreasonable one. As for evolution, I agree, but as I said it doesn't contradict intelligent design at all. Any gracious intelligent designer would design the lifeforms so that they would improve over time. Or, perhaps the designer's skill increased over time, and it was the designer that was evolving, allowing him to create better lifeforms with each generation. Still, I'd say that BOTH theories apply, intelligent design for macroscopic changes and evolution for the more subtle ones. The only reasonable hole in the evolution theory is that evolution is continuous, wheras not all changes were. An example would be how things came to fly. Flight requires multiple things: light density, wings, disproportionally strong muscles, etc. The point is that in evolution, the fact that at one stage a lifeform had none of these properties, and that a related life form later had all of these properties would imply that between those two species would exist a species with half those properties. If some lizard evolved into a bird, that would imply that between the lizard and bird there would be a species that might have wings but has bones too thick to get off the ground, or a species with half dense bones, half-wings, and slightly stronger muscles. Such a species would neither take to the air nor have much success on the ground, so according to survival of the fittest it would not survive. Since this species would be an ancestor to the species coming after it, it would imply that birds would never have come to exist. Evolution explains changes in species very nicely, but sometimes fails to explain big changes, and does NOT explain at all where the first life-form came from in the first place.

Well, two wrongs don't make a right...native americans bein oppressed historically was wrong, but it in no way means we should have ignored Hussein as long as we did. The thing that bothers people about this war is that the motives do not match the justification. Clearly Hussein's actions justify the forcible removal of the Baathist regime...but if that was the motive the operation would have occurred well before 2002. The motivation for the war is vague and general though. Clearly, democratic countries produce terrorists at a drastically lower rate than dictatorships. Dictatorships will do whatever they feel they can get away with, and every threat made that isn't backed up by action results in dictators thinking the west's threats are empty. The pattern of giving Saddam ultimatums and then not backing them up because we could avoid war by backing down has led other dictatorships in the area to think that they could do whatever they want to their people and not have to worry about reprisal from us. Their oppression creates terrorists. When it became clear on September 11th that terrorism will not always contain itself in the country that breeds it, it became clear that terrorism must be dealt with. Not only that, the root cause of terrorism, dictatorial oppression, has to be dealt with. We will get nowhere by simply asking dictators to give up power and move towards democracy, for it is human nature to desire power above almost all else. We need to threaten them to move towards democracy, and to do so we needed to demonstrate that we are willing and capable of backing up our threats. That is what the motive was. Hussein was threatened up and down by both the UN and the US, but not much previous action was taken. He needed to be removed to show dictators that we mean business. The we needed to demonstrate our power was the motive. That Hussein oppressed his people was the justification. Thus, war was started.

One important point I would like to point out is that intelligent design is not the same thing as creationism. Another thing I need to point out is that neither theory is exclusive to evolution. Perhaps the intelligent designer intended for the created lifeform to evolve? The debate is really intelligent design vs. the primordial soup theory. I side with intelligent design. The primordial soup theory violates the Law of Entropy, which states that all physical systems will in general go from chaotic to entropic states. Molecules in general spread out into a even mixture, and don't come together into some sort of functional arrangement. For a good analogy, the odds of a collection of primordial molecules coming together to form a lifeform would be similar to that of a tornado travelling over an iron mine, collecting some materials, and somehow spitting out a Honda Civic. In that light, I'd say that there must (okay, technically I have 99.99999...% certainty) that somehow someway something MADE those molecules come together the way they did, and likely played a guiding hand in how that lifeform came to evolve. And this is science, though it can only be indicated rather than proven. If I handed you a 6 sided die, and told you that die could either be weighted or random. Suppose for some reason, you couldn't analyze or dissect that die. You throw it 100 times and it always lands on 5. The probability of the die being unweighted is 1.5306467*10^-78, practically zero. On the other hand, its virtually certain that the die is weighted. However, you can't *prove* either possibility. Yet, the rational and scientific conclusion is that the die is weighted. As for creationism...there are some anomalies that need to be pointed out. The first one is that God created our universe, implying that He made the laws of physics, implying that He of all people can abide by them. Thus, all miracles will have a scientific explaination, and are just a matter or probability. The ten plagues of Egypt can easily be explained by science, its just that what are the odds that all these things would happen to Egypt at the exact moment when Moses was asking to let his people go? Secondly, God created our universe, and therefore He is not a part of our universe. He is part of us and part of us are part of this universe, but it doesn't go beyond that. Point being, there's no big man in the clouds anywhere physically. God is much more than anything our universe could contain. Third, he atleast has as much control over our universe as an author has over a book. Thus, prequels are possible. God could indeed have made humans first, and went back and wrote the story of the prehumandkind universe later. The only discrepency is whether we are using our point of view or His. Fourth, Creationism deals with Eden anyway, which is a clearly completely different place than Earth, and likely outside our universe.

...SeVeR.

...but sewed it on in the wrong place.

wow, I didn't know Tex had 11 toes and 5 nipples. CATERPIE, USE YOUR HYPERBEAM ATTACK!!! *Caterpie Hyper-Beams whatever is left of poor Tex*

Actually, the official Catholic view is to oppose both abortion and capitial punishment. If one is absolutely positively sure that the person committed murder, execution of that person is considered moral, but the official church position is that since one cannot be absolutely positively sure, one shouldn't be using capital punishment. So, Astro, the church doesn't contradict itself at all. I, on the other hand, being the not-so-good christian that I am, think capital punishment should be legal, so that it could only be used when we are absolutely positively sure that the piece of s!@#$%^&* did the crime, the crime being multiple homicides of people, atleast one of which not deserving death. (For example, someone who offs 12 drug dealers illegaly should not be executed (infact, if it were not for the legal mess it would cause, I'd say that person should be given a medal and deputized), but someone who shoots random people off the street should be executed.) I read an editorial in the newpaper a few weeks ago. The writer could respect both fringe positions but not the moderate one. In his opinion either the fetus has the rights of a person and its wrong to kill it, or the fetus doesn't and abortion is acceptible...those that think the fetus has the rights of a person but do not wish to interfere with the rights of the woman's choice are fools. I can agree with the statement the moderation in this issue is clearly immoral. I guess I should ask at this point if those on the left agree. yeah, Spyed's posts are deleted now. I like to be a little patient with ppl, give them a few chances before taking action (as long as giving them those chances doesn't hurt anything). For the record: Spyed, your posts are deleted for being spam and off-topic.

*applies hairgel to give the triangular hair look, and dies hair green* *puts on blue jeens, a hat turned backwards, a sleevless T-shirt and vest, and biker gloves* *shouts at the top of his lungs in predrawn pose with generic background in traditional japanese cartoon fashion* "FLAMINGSTARCH, I CHALLENGE YOU!!!" *does quick generic dance, ending in throwing a pokeball out* "CATERPIE, GO!"

I think that the UK is democratic enough, and that every flaw in it is overpreportionalized. Remember how the "winner" was chosen in this poll. They polled the audience, which I would assume was a group of college students. A group with those demographics is almost certain to vote that "democracy is on its back" no matter what happened in the debate.

*not dead, gets up off of ground* *points and laughs at Tex* (Since this is FFVIII we are using here, the moon is covered with a !@#$%^&*load of monsters that swarm upon and eat Tex the moment he arrives, and if I'm not mistaken, the effect Carbuncle gives is to just caste the reflect effect on the party.)

*steals shipment of cellular destabilizers* *uses cellular destabilizers on Manus* *Manus' cellular phone flies out of his pocket and explodes*

*Replaces spine with futuristic robotic cyber-spine* *jumps up about 50ft in the air* *lands on Manus' head* *repeatedly kicks Manus upward* *gets 50 hit combo* *kicks Manus into concrete wall for KO* *leg swipes flamingstarch* *points and laughs as flamingstarch doesn't have enough limbs to push himself off the ground*