Are you an atheist?

[AccessBlaster]

The creator(s) will turn out to be 3 feet tall with almond shaped eyes. The earth? nothing more then a petri dish on the ass end of the universe. Everything you think you know, will be spun 180 degrees. So relax and enjoy the show peeps.

 

[Galaxiom]

Consider for a moment it's a nice hot sunny day. The little lizards and insects are out and about. Millions of years of instinct tell them it will be like this for a week or so.

Then you decide to mow the lawn and water the garden. From their point of view you are super natural..

Yes, perhaps from their point of view being ignorant of the bigger picture of nature. If they could communicate they might even create and pass on a myth to explain what they don't understand like humans did when we didn't fully comprehend our environment..

But as we came to understand nature, we cast out myth after myth until there was nothing left that needed an explanation beyond the known natural laws. We now have a scientific grasp of development of the Universe from the moment when the first pixel of amorphous energy appeared right through to what we observe today.

Even the fuzzy bits regarding the axis of the observed Universe and the apparent attraction of matter in a particular direction don't inspire us to suggest it is due to a god. Instead scientists propose natural causes, albeit beyond the limits of what we can observe. These hypotheses are followed by observations that determine which ones can be ruled out.

Your alien god hypothesis is a solution in need of a problem that doesn't exist.

 

[Galaxiom]

The expression "Most scientists also agree" and similar statements all have one thing in common and that is with the passage of time the error rate proves to be close enough to 100%

Utter rubbish. You are again demonstrating your complete ignorance of science as you did in the debates about evolution.

Science is a matter of refinement and has been incredibly successful as sorting out the truth from the fiction ever since the implementation of the modern scientific method of testing hypotheses rather than just contemplating what may have been the will of God.

For example, Newton was correct about Gravitation and his Laws of Motion are still applied today. Einstein simply refined them by adding in a factor that is only significant when the body is moving at speed that is a significant fraction of the speed of light.

I challenge you to name even one scientifically accepted principle that has turned out to be completely wrong.

 

[Libre]

I challenge you to name even one scientifically accepted principle that has turned out to be completely wrong.

An enticing challenge. It should be easy, one would think, to come up with just one, but there are two clauses of the challenge that make it unassailable, no matter what anyone suggests.

Galaxiom's hypothesis, basically, is that not one scientifically accepted principle has turned out to be completely wrong. The challenge is to disprove that hypothesis by coming up with a valid example of one, but that turns out to be impossible. This makes the hypothesis poorly worded or implausible because it can't be disproved.

The two clauses that I refer to are variants of the "True Scotsman" fallacy and/or the "moving the goalpost" fallacy.

Not that I disagree with Galaxiom, I hasten to add!!!!
Mike is clearly out in left field with his "atheism takes more faith than religion" and "alien god" metaphors. I TOTALLY agree with Galaxiom, but in the spirit of honest debate and keeping the gaming tables clean, it should be pointed out that no matter what anyone says, Galaxiom could respond that the example:
-was not a scientifically accepted principle;
or that
-it was not proved completely wrong.

and it would be very hard to dispute either objection.

Not that it's stopped me from trying.
Let me see - well, a lot of Aristotle's ideas have been shown to be hogwash - the geocentric model of the solar system and the impossibility of the number zero, being two such examples.
Oh wait, maybe those weren't scientifically accepted.

Ah, I got it!
Lemarck's Theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics
Hmmm. Not completely wrong. (and probably not fully accepted either)

I'll keep working on it.

 

[Frothingslosh]

Honestly, the closest I can come to coming up with one later proved wrong was the concept of 'ether' in interplanetary space. That was proven wrong when it was shown that light does NOT need a medium through which to travel. Even there, though, that was a widespread assumption that was proven wrong, not an empirically tested, scientifically proven and accepted 'fact'.

Overall, empirical testing has proven many, many ASSUMPTIONS wrong, but no scientifically tested and accepted principles that I can think of.

The EM Drive *MAY* do this if it turns out to be a real effect, but it's far, far more likely that it will simply result in modifications and corrections to existing theories. At worst, it may open up a whole new branch of Physics the way Einstein's papers did.

 

[The_Doc_Man]

The expression "Most scientists also agree" and similar statements all have one thing in common and that is with the passage of time the error rate proves to be close enough to 100%

We could play around with "No True Scotsman" fallacies and "Moving the Goalpost" ploys, as previously mentioned, but I will approach this in a different way.

With the passage of time we have learned things that allow us to reject scientifically inaccurate principles - e.g. phlogiston (as the "element" of fire) and ether (as a light transmission medium). Therefore, we COULD say that science is self-correcting such that we do, indeed, revisit ideas and disprove them even though they were "gospel" at the time. We are the ones who move our own goalposts. We who are the scientists of the world are the driving force to modernize and update scientific knowledge. We are the ones who keep science from stagnating.

But let's ask the parallel question for religion: Since the old Council of Nicea that did what it did to "tie down and confirm" the contents of the Bible, what (if anything) have we learned about God that wasn't knowable back then? Explain to me why the religious people of the world have allowed the teachings of the Bible to stagnate? At MOST, we have a couple of new translations, but what new things have we learned about God that could not have been determined at the time of the Council of Nicea simply by reading and studying the Bible?

We have some new philosophical interpretations of what this or that passage really means, but that could have happened at any time once we had a well-defined Bible. We have some weasel-word evasions to cover for the fact that science has unequivocally disproved some things that the Bible says are so, and proved things that the Bible says aren't so.

The scientific side of the house can grow. The religious side of the house is still stuck in the same mud of the last couple of millennia. The biggest problem is that since you cannot test the mystical parts of the Bible, you can't even tell just how close we are to your 100% error rate. But on the non-mystical parts, the error rate is high and growing higher as we study our world.

 

[Galaxiom]

Let me see - well, a lot of Aristotle's ideas have been shown to be hogwash - the geocentric model of the solar system and the impossibility of the number zero, being two such examples.

You will note I said:

Science is a matter of refinement and has been incredibly successful as sorting out the truth from the fiction ever since the implementation of the modern scientific method of testing hypotheses rather than just contemplating what may have been the will of God. (Emphasis added)

Lemarck's Theory of Inheritance of Acquired Characteristics.

Lemark only had a hypothesis without any theory of a mechanism of how the acquired characteristics were inherited. Until there is a theory to test there really is no science as such, just observation and speculation.

The Theories of Relativity and Quantum Mechanics cover the entirety of the fundamental mechanisms of the Universe. Thousands of experiments have been conducted to test the theories and without exception they have confirmed them. The Higgs Boson turning up on cue exactly as predicted by theory was one of the spectacular example of how modern science is led by theoretical knowledge confirmed by the scientific method.

Anything radically new won't overturn these theories but will describe their underlying mechanisms in the same way Einstein's Relativity showed what was behind Newtonian Gravity.

 

[speakers_86]

There is nothing wrong with proving a theory wrong, that is what makes the science so great, is that it is self-correcting. Over time, it becomes closer and closer to being correct.

I believe that we cannot know everything there is to know. I once read that there is a theory that we cannot know all of the math there is to know, I think this applies to science as well. Here is an article that says something of the sort. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but it looks interesting.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/limits-on-human-comprehension/

 

[Libre]

I challenge you to name even one scientifically accepted principle that has turned out to be completely wrong.

Okay Galax - I'm up for the challenge.
Is Googling in the spirit of this thing?
Or do I have to come up with it on my own. Because I probably can't. But I'm pretty sure there are plenty of examples - Scotsmen and goalposts notwithstanding.

 

[Rabbie]

Even if there are examples where science got it completely wrong then science has corrected those errors. Many of the errors were due to the inability to get accurate observations due to the limitations of instrumentation etc.

I once read in a sci-fi magazine that if you could send a 1960s transistor radio back to the 1920s it would work but it would have been impossible to reproduce it except by chance because with those days technology it would have been impossible to measure the small amount of impurities in the silicon required to make a functioning transistor

 

[Libre]

Even if there are examples where science got it completely wrong then science has corrected those errors.

Very different from saying it's never happened.

 

[AccessBlaster]

I think it funny how science knows more about what's going to happen then what's already happened. Just a couple examples, Puma Punku and machu picchu. Science seems to know more about the moon or mars then what's happened in their backyard a few thousand years ago.

 

[Frothingslosh]

Archaeology is a discipline where it's FAR harder to figure out what's happening, because it's much, much more difficult to test hypotheses. Additionally, unlike physics, archaeology is subject to data being destroyed (by both human and natural causes), distorted, and just lost to time.

We can send equipment to Mars and the moon to take and test samples and run experiments. With archaeology, you can't just go look up a convenient ruin and dig up 'why this or that was done'.

 

[AccessBlaster]

Archaeology is a discipline where it's FAR harder to figure out what's happening, because it's much, much more difficult to test hypotheses. Additionally, unlike physics, archaeology is subject to data being destroyed (by both human and natural causes), distorted, and just lost to time.

We can send equipment to Mars and the moon to take and test samples and run experiments. With archaeology, you can't just go look up a convenient ruin and dig up 'why this or that was done'.

While I agree with everything you mentioned above, it took a great knowledge of of physics to pull off what you see in the above examples. Second these examples are well preserved, so testing is not an issue.

How is it we devolved? Where is the science? Will we grow fins and crawl back into the oceans?

 

[Rabbie]

Very different from saying it's never happened.

Congratulations on your grasp of the English language I have not expressed an opinion on whether there have been any errors. I was trying to reinforce the point that Science when not constrained by religious dogmas does correct its mistakes. But scientific advances must go hand in hand with technological ones.

 

[Frothingslosh]

How is it we devolved? Where is the science? Will we grow fins and crawl back into the oceans?

Okay, you lost me on this one.

 

[AccessBlaster]

Okay, you lost me on this one.

LOL, lost it myself. If we can't explain this type of ancient architecture, with modern science. Have we really evolved. We can split the atom, but nobody has a clue how ancient peoples placed 100 ton boulders. It seems like a paradox.

 

[Libre]

Congratulations on your grasp of the English language I have not expressed an opinion on whether there have been any errors. I was trying to reinforce the point that Science when not constrained by religious dogmas does correct its mistakes. But scientific advances must go hand in hand with technological ones.

Edit
Sorry - my mistake. Thought you were taking Galaxiom's position - or that you somehow thought you were. What you wrote was quite clear but I still misconstrued.

 

[Libre]

LOL, lost it myself. If we can't explain this type of ancient architecture, with modern science. Have we really evolved. We can split the atom, but nobody has a clue how ancient peoples placed 100 ton boulders. It seems like a paradox.

Like Frothy said, reconstructing human events from the past is a very different matter from understanding the forces in the universe.
I took some anthro courses in college and they do have a clue how they placed the boulders, by the way. With ramps. But science is not going to fully explain ancient human activity, any more than a detective can totally reconstruct a crime scene. Past events are not observable or testable.

 

[AccessBlaster]

I agree, although the method they used does not have endless possibility's. The laws of physics were used. They were under the same restraints we are. So that narrows the options considerably. Ancient man must have been smarter.