theonion.com — As the debate over the teaching of evolution in public schools continues, a new controversy over the science curriculum arose Monday. Scientists from the Evangelical Center For Faith-Based Reasoning are now asserting that the long-held "theory of gravity" is flawed and they have responded to it with a new theory of Intelligent Falling.
Sep 3, 2008 View in Crawl 4
housewarmerSep 3, 2008
I think you need to spend some time reading more of the Onion's archives. You may discover an error in your perspective on this article.
s0l0s0ul_Sep 3, 2008
lol agreed, but it is just a really horrible state of affairs, when it doesnt seem so far fetched that some fundamentalist might actually try to use an argument such as this.
hangoverboySep 4, 2008
Who's fighting?
staticthunderSep 8, 2008
So your premise is God is hiding from us somewhere else in the universe?Please. This is getting really stupid.Absence of evidence IS evidence of absence IF YOU HAVE LOOKED IN THE APPROPRIATE PLACE, because there is abundant data that show that we have not found what we should be finding if your premise was true! Negative results ARE evidence in those circumstances! Your hypothesis should be capable of explaining negative results better than MY hypothesis, and its not. Pure Bayesian epistemology.You would have me believe that there is an elephant living in your refrigerator. That a perfect God created us in a state of imperfection along with all sorts of caveats that don't befit a supreme being who is whole unto himself (desire for worship, original sin, need for love) that are entirely unnecessary. The paradox of God's free will and ultimate goodness alongside man's seeming inability to have both characteristics. That man, the pinnacle of his creation has an appendix that exists only to plague him with suffering and numerous problems related to his upright gait. That an omnipotent being couldn't do better than what we see around us.I have plenty of evidence against a perfect, omnipotent God. This "absence of evidence" is a very good evidence of absence. In seeking empirical objective evidence of a creator, there is none to be found, when one would think such a being would WANT us to have an easy time finding him. Why the necessity of faith? What is the point of that except to damn millions of people who choose the wrong faith?Please, I have a brain. Stop trying to get me to turn it off. "Well, it doesn't conform to logic, and it strikes me as silly"Yes, absolutely, and so there is no point in using rhetoric and argumentation to debate something that YOU ADMIT doesn't conform to logic!!!Just accept that belief in god is irrational, unfit for intelligent conversation and be done with it already. Its a bad idea. If you want to hold it, I can't stop you, but you have no good reason for doing so.
s0l0s0ul_Sep 10, 2008
Thats cool static, you dont have to believe there is a god, of any kind. I would never try to get you to believe that there is one, because there is no point to that really! You are most definitely entitled to your belief (or lack there of rather) and who am I to try and dissuade you from it? Im just another guy with another perspective.You most definitely cant reject someone, or something, that you have never met. The only difference between you and I, is that I met him, and decided to embrace him. Maybe some day he will show himself to you, but I must say, its going to be increasingly difficult to see him when he does, if you are not searching for him as well. After all, even scientists search for answers, they dont just wait for the answer to present itself to them. They search with open minds to whatever the outcome might be.Believers and I are the only ones who believe he is real (well, other than lucifer "...even the demons believe and shudder..." but that is an entirely different conversation.) We choose to believe he is real, even with the absence of scientific evidence, which is why we require faith. If you want no part of him, I most definitely respect that! As for the evidence you would like (and "you" being anyone looking for scientific, undeniable proof) I wish I had it to share with you, honestly, but sadly I dont as of today. All I have is my personal belief, and personal experiences, which can hardly be described as scientific.I wish you would search for a teapot in space however, because if you do find one, i need a new one at home so please let me know ;) kiddingOh, thankyou for explaining the term "weak atheist" to me. I had never heard it before, but now understand what it means.Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
eir574Sep 12, 2008
"Static says that there are infinite possibilities... he's right, of course. But we have roughly the same level of evidence for all of them. To go on and dismiss ones that simply "sounds silly" is counter intuitive."Isn't that exactly what you did with the teapot orbiting Pluto? It sounds silly to you and you can't stretch your mind to imagine that someone could come to you and say that he seriously believes it exists. Therefore, you reject it both because it sounds silly in and of itself and because it sounds silly to think that anyone could think such a thing. Comment is buried, click here to see the rest.
s0l0s0ul_Sep 14, 2008
Wow, I cant believe this thread is still going, especially when i was made fun of for trying to start an educational debate on an onion article! Kudos to all of you!I think that the big misunderstanding here, is that relating man made objects (such as teapots) or creatures such as "pink elephants", which may be just as made up as God (the difference being that one was made up based on absolute fiction, while the other, at the least can be discussed on some sort of philosophical level) creates an emotional response because followers of Christianity, consider it to be more than just a black and white code for living life, but rather, they have strong emotions towards/for God. It would be sort of like me saying to you that my father was a great man, and he passed away, but before he did he did all these amazing things which i believe benefit the world, and then someone else comes along and says that he didnt exist, because they never met him, and he is no more real than pink elephants or flying teapots. This statement would be true, because since you have never met him, he wouldnt be any more real to you than these "figments" but there would still be a little bit of the sting of insult felt, because of the personal meaning my father had in my own life.I think that a better exercise would be this:Crunch deluxe, do you believe in Buddha? Do you believe in Vishnu? Do you believe in Allah? When you analyze and understand the reasons why you dont believe in these gods, then you will have a much better understanding of why atheists dont believe in your (our) God. Atheists are not exercising a "willful denying" of God, they are just expressing an "absence of" God approach.The only things we can say for sure, is that there may be a God, there may not be a God, There is definitely more scientific evidence that there is not a God, and that our belief in God is, at this point, based on personal experience alone, which there is most definitely not anything scientific about. Thus, just to bring it full circle, there would actually be more proof for a teapot circling pluto, because we can scientifically prove that teapots do exist, and that pluto exists, but we have yet to witness said teapot orbiting said planet. Looking at the argument this way, in no way invalidates our belief in God, it does however show, that there is much more faith necessary to believe in him, given there is no scientific proof of any kind, for his existence.
onthetrailSep 14, 2008
You know what I love ,I love when a real scientist knows more than most of you all puttogether.the seeing in nature is one of the greatest things here with us now to believe in god.he seasons god takes care of all things now or in the future.which I would definably be wary of unless you acknowledge him for who he is?
crunchydeluxeSep 22, 2008
"In fact, you'll find that flood story in other cultures' mythologies as well."Lending a certain credence to the idea that there may have been such a flood. I'm well aware of many of these flood stories. "While this is true in many cases, that doesn't mean that I need to consider every one of the infinite hypotheses one could make about the universe as being likely enough to warrant serious consideration. Even if I only limit myself to the hypotheses for which one could come up with the same amount of historical evidence with which you credit your religion, I'd still be left with an unbelievably large (and perhaps still infinite) number of them."Which is exactly the grounds for my saying that we're not nearly as far along as we think. We're trying to pinpoint the secrets of the universe, but we're pushing aside some --perfectly legitimate-- ideas, in favor of others. Problem is, that's all just a shot in the dark, thus far."I don't think you're likely to find someone who does that for any other reason"Ah, but I have. And yes, some of it was a result of direct pressure from government sources. This isn't paranoia, this is experience."The Discovery Institute's wedge document clearly explains that the purpose of introducing creationism into schools (cloaked as intelligent design, of course) is to reintroduce Christianity to the public school classroom."I'll grant you that. However, the Discovery Institute does not represent the Intelligent Design community, so much as it represents a certain audience of Christians who feel they have no other recourse than to shove their religion down everyone's throats. I feel, for these people, but I absolutely do NOT endorse, condone, or even agree with their tactic, OR their goal. And honestly, most genuine Christians don't. We don't want to impose our religion on anybody... we also don't want anybody imposing their views on us.But back to the Intelligent Design community for a moment... The identity of the Intelligent Creator isn't that of any specific god. The actual concept is not in any way a veiled attempt at injecting any particular religion... it's simply the theory that the universe may have been created by a higher being. Might this be the Christian god? Might this be the Jewish god? Or the Muslim god? Who knows... this is out of the scope of the theory. Whether or not this has been consistent with the practice is debatable... but the theory itself transcends the quaint little religions that we've gotten accustomed to.
eir574Sep 26, 2008
"Lending a certain credence to the idea that there may have been such a flood. "But, even if we could prove definitively that there was a very large scale flood, that does not prove that the supernatural aspects of the bible are factual. Do you seriously not agree with that? If I wanted to invent a religion, I'd incorporate major events into the mythology surrounding that religion. If I believed I was a deity or that a deity had spoken to me and wanted me to write down the tenets of a religion, I'd probably also incorporate some things that are incontrovertibly true. In the first case (inventing a religion to fool people), it would lend veracity. In the second case (honestly believing that I had reached some sort of spiritual understanding about the existence of some previously unknown deity), I'd probably tend to explain major events -- and particularly major catastrophes -- as having supernatural causes. People have been doing that all through history. That doesn't mean that the supernatural aspects of ancient mythologies must therefore have some truth to them. It only means that they were partially based in truth."it's simply the theory that the universe may have been created by a higher being"Which is not at all a scientific theory. It's not predictable. It's not testable. It doesn't help us make any predictions about the natural world. It's a philosophical or religious theory, not a scientific one. I don't care what you believe, but I don't want scientific education held back by diluting it with pseudoscience, metaphysics, religion, etc. Centuries ago you could have said that a god harnesses the sun to his chariot and drags it across the sky each day, but would that "theory" eventually have helped us put a satellite into orbit?
Closed AccountMay 6, 2009
Saddly, there is something in the bible where Satan tempted Jesus to jump off a building and use his power to defy gravity.