On Saturday, July 6, 2019 at 5:53:28 AM UTC-5, Philip Thrift wrote: > > > > On Saturday, July 6, 2019 at 3:48:12 AM UTC-5, Cosmin Visan wrote: >> >> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4sP1E1Jd_Y >> <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4sP1E1Jd_Y&fbclid=IwAR03cRVkBTOeYnPldcuLzFGCNiWqCR0dE5FENXF9JJtRlk75sbq5Dh2wxcY> >> > > > > You know that this YouTube channel - *T**he Discovery Science News > Channel is the official Youtube channel of Discovery Institute's Center for > Science & Culture* - is via a conservative evangelical Christian > organization. > > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Institute > > *The Discovery Institute (DI) is a politically conservative non-profit > think tank based in Seattle, Washington, that advocates the > pseudoscientific concept of intelligent design (ID). Its "Teach the > Controversy" campaign aims to permit the teaching of anti-evolution, > intelligent-design beliefs in United States public high school science > courses in place of accepted scientific theories, positing that a > scientific controversy exists over these subjects.* > > *Center for Science and Culture (CSC) promotes "a rigorously God-centered > view of creation, including a new 'science' based solidly on theism.* > > @philipthrift >
The speaker James Tour also signed the *Scientific Dissent from Darwinism*, which is a bit like the list of 100 physicists who disagreed with Einstein. Einstein quipped back, why do you need 100, when only 1 with a correct argument would suffice? Tour is a fundy, and while he may have done reasonable research, he appears religiously biased here. I also can tell in the way he talks that he can pound people down with words pretty well. Tour is right in that we do not know the origins of life. We have lots of hypotheses on this, but it is a point where biological evolution loses explanatory power, just as general relativity fails at the center of black hole collapse. Tour though makes the implicit statement that this will never be answered, or that it is a scientific impossibility to know. The real problem is that we have no data; we have a complete paucity of data on the chemistry that lead to the development of life. We might find such data on other planets, and maybe Mars is a start. Maybe prebiotic chemistry has degraded and been lost there, so maybe Enceladus or ... ? We may even in fact never find such data and be left dangling with only hypotheticals. We are in a better position to understand the origins of the universe than the origins of life, and this question may be with us for a while. The problem I have with people such as Tour is the same I would have with similar of argumenta by similar people in the 17th century who might say we humans can never know the principles of planetary motion. They would argue this is the province of God and His heavenly hosts and that we will never find physical principles when this is all a matter of divine providence and supernatural power. The net effect of such an argument is to stop inquiry. LC -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/056366b1-a6a7-4cf1-b6e2-5d25c4126577%40googlegroups.com.
