Sci Fri: Richard Dawkins + 'Intelligent Design\ufffd'

Post #184,535

11/19/04 4:34:42 PM

Anyone catch [link|http://www.sciencefriday.com/| these] back-back gems today?
(Briefly encapsulated [link|http://www.sciencefriday.com/pages/2004/Nov/hour1_111904.html| here].)

Discussion of the MO via which Creationists spawn new catchphrases / now mean to add stickers to texts, "This is just a theory" :-0 {So Don't Be Fooled!}

Simplest response I can come up with. The sticker thingie is a perfect analogue for,

Log entry:
The Captain was on the bridge. And he was sober.

Dawkins is a treat; crisp but not terse, complemented nicely by Ira's having Read His Book, The Ancestor's Tale, modelled a bit after Canterbury - thus readable in little snippets.

Makes short work of above thesis, in oblique ref to Creationists as religious ignoramuses -- pointing out that the Pope is just as exasperated with these ilk, for giving religion a bad name.. This was merely a brief diversion from much more interesting matters -- while also clarifying another staple of the ignoramus arsenal of mindfucks:

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics ---> entropy, chaos.
"Closed System" saith he, and explains.
Life: supremely non-random.

Authentic English spoken too, always a treat.

moi

Post #184,578

by static

11/20/04 7:14:52 AM

Hmm.

There was some research done a few years ago about how paranormal and supernatural activity and perceptions might be explained by electro-magnetic fields on the human brain. There were some cases like where a person who said her bedroom was haunted removed her electronic alarm clock from the room and everything stopped. There were also some experiments where researchers were able to reproduce "a religious experience" by inducing certain types of electronic-magnetic fields in someone's brain which was kind of a reversal of the previous effect.

As an ultimate acid test, the documentary makers got in contact with Richard Dawkins who thought it was intriguing enough to participate. The researchers could not induce "a religious experience" - but they noted afterward that he was far from the first. A questionaire they had put together for participants showed a very strong trend of people who had few or no religious convictions were not able to be so induced. It was implied that Richard Dawkins was perhaps an extreme case of that.

However, both the researchers and the documentary makers were careful to not draw any sort of conclusion. Particularly as the researchers are not held in high-esteem for pursuing this type of resarch...

Wade.

Is it enough to love
Is it enough to breathe
Somebody rip my heart out
And leave me here to bleed

Is it enough to die
Somebody save my life
I'd rather be Anything but Ordinary
Please

-- "Anything but Ordinary" by Avril Lavigne.

Post #184,744

by Ashton

11/22/04 5:40:48 AM

We may know quite too little about 'fields'

to conceive very good experiments, but it may be as good an analogy as any, for the sorts of things latent in our jelloware, and what might trigger these.

Many wondered, after Life After Life [Mood? Moody?] - whether the white/light, black tunnel effect might be hard-wired into our nervous system; then there were the correlations: of 17 IIRC items cited by his interviewees (all of whom had been 'clinically dead' for some period) there were 7-9? which were common to some %large of his samples.

I find the 'more solid' of such reports intriguing, but I doubt we shall find a transistorized substitute for {somehow working through} the metaphysical ropes - in our model-building of the largely Unknowable.
(6-D phase-space might be a bit small to play in, though -- just a guess, mind you.)

Ain't it just like! uppity bipeds to imagine someone else can do the work for us? Maybe at $7/hr, too.

Welcome to IWETHEY!