Horace Heffner wrote:
A marrow transplant cure, especially using gene therapy on the
patient's own cells to obtain the new marrow, is well within the
reach of US medical capabilities, both technically and financially.
I do not think so. A bone marrow transplant costs ~$250,000 and there
are 1.1 million people suffering from AIDS in the U.S. I do not think
we can afford $275 billion to cure them. I do not think you could
find ~1.1 million donors, or the hospital space, or enough doctors.
Also, hundreds of thousands of the patients would die, whereas people
may soon live indefinitely with conventional AIDS treatments.
Well, not perfectly proven, but Hume (and I) are of the opinion
Yes, your empiricism is a matter of faith, a premise, not a proved or
provable assertion.
It is not based on faith but rather experiment and observation of
nature. That does not prove it is true, but it is at least objective
and not based on faith or imagination.
You can not accept that any event can violate the laws by which the
universe typically operates . . .
Laws of physics are absolute, not "typical." If you ever confirm an
exception, that proves you do not understand the laws, not that they
have been violated. In biology behavior is "typical" and there are
many exceptions to every rule (which are actually only 'rules of
thumb' or approximations).
. . . especially an event which represents an intelligent intervention.
Obviously intelligent intervention can prevent the laws of nature
from operating!
Here again you show your inability to conceive that one of a kind
events can operate outside the laws of physics.
I can conceive of such events easily! Anyone can. But as far as I
know, they never occur. There is no evidence for them, and no reason
to think they exist.
You *assume* all such events operate under these laws.
No, I know of no solid, objective evidence for events that do not
operate under these laws. That's quite a different assertion.
As time goes by we see how silly some of the conceptual frameworks
of science are.
Some are, but others are not.
Often such descriptions of one of a kind events are nothing more
than hypotheses which can never be proven empirically or otherwise.
A hypothesis that can never be proven (tested -- proved or falsified)
has no meaning in the real world. It is not a scientific hypothesis,
but only speculation.
Your belief in your faith of science of course has no relevance to
those who have experienced miracles.
No one has ever experienced a miracle. All reported experiences are
myths, misunderstandings, experiences of natural events
misunderstood, and so on. There are no credible, objectively measured
reports of miracles.
Your belief that laws of science apply to all events in the universe
without exception, that yours is the one true religion, is as closed
minded as any other form
of fundamentalism.
That is true. We lack imagination, and we refuse to believe any
assertion about the physical world that is not measured with
instruments or other objective means (usually repeatable means -- but
not always). This is indeed very limiting, and it takes away much of
the magic of life, and large chunks of human culture and history. But
in my opinion, this is a virtue, not a fault. I think that people who
believe in miracles suffer from having too much imagination. They are
too open-minded. (There are also many people in the over-unity energy
field who suffer from these problems.) Overactive imagination has
held back the progress of the human race almost as much as not having
enough imagination.
There are many reasons for this. First, as Artemous Ward put it: "it
ain't so much the things we don't know that get us into trouble. It's
the things we know that just ain't so." Imagining things which are
not there can get you into as much trouble as being blind to real
things. Many pre-modern medical treatments were based on imaginary
medical theory such as "the balance of humours" and they used to kill
more patients than they saved. Imaginary weapons of mass destruction
have caused a lot of grief lately. Another reason is that having an
imaginary solution to a problem may prevent you from looking for a
real solution. For example, if you think that living species were
created by an intelligent being (either all at once, or gradually),
or that they came from another planet, you may not see any point to
looking for naturalistic, evolutionary mechanisms. This will prevent
progress in biology, medicine, and self-knowledge. It will reinforce
other harmful, imaginary and nonsensical notions such as racial
superiority. As Francis Bacon pointed out, it is better to reject
lots dubious knowledge and be left with few beliefs than it is to
accept too much, too uncritically, without applying objective
standards and methods of testing.
- Jed
