runner,

I've never heard a scientist say "the science is settled". I have, however, heard them say that the science is never settled.

Saying someone is deceived is a long way from accusing them of lying. We all have our own ways of making sense of our condition, and though it's often frustrating to get our message across, to ascribe base motives and behaviours on that count is unfair.

When all is said and done, we could all probably do with a reminder occasionally (myself included) to treat our opponents in debate with a little more respect.

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/01/eye-burrowing-worms-national-t.html

So runner, who created the loa loa or African eyeworm, which
burrows through childrens eyeballs?

Runner,

I agree the scientific methods for determining age - particularly of fossils and rocks supposedly millions of years old - is a very complex business, and I gave up trying to understand it. Still, maybe it's no more of a stretch than the work being done on sub-atomic particles with the 'particle accelerator', or on quantum physics, quarks, black-holes and supernovas? I am not a scientist, but I don't think there is some sort of conspiracy going on to keep scientists employed on 'pies in the sky'. 'You can fool some of the people ...'

So much science is verifiable and widely accepted - like Newton's Laws or radioactivity and the atomic bomb, viruses and vaccines - just where does one reasonably draw the line between truth and conjecture?

If we cannot have reasonable faith in science and mathematics (on which so much of science is based), what then do we believe? Are we really communicating on the internet, or is this too just an illusion?

The physical world has many signs of great age and of many past civilisations, of early flora and fauna, of cataclysm and of climate change, even of the migration of tectonic plates and the dispersion of a former supercontinent of Gondwana. For anyone to think that the world is just how God created it some 6,000 years ago (our time), well after the last ice-age, well after much human migration over long-lost land bridges and sea-ice bridges, is to refute human migration and human adaptation to new and changed climates. If that's not a stretch, then I don't know what is.

Evolution may indeed be by 'design', but it is nonetheless real and is exemplified by both the abundance of, and the identifiable relationships between, species - past, present and future.

When Adam and Eve ate of the forbidden fruit they made a choice, they defied God's wishes and chose to explore the real world, warts and all. It is a pity some now choose to live only in the garden and fail to see the wonders beyond.

We either agree on the realities of the world, as outlined over many years in various literature, and incorporated fairly uniformly in school curriculums world-wide, or we live in a disparate chaotic mixture of various competing doctrines.

I agree with Saltpetre, Sunday, 11 March 2012 12:19:05 AM

The mechanisms of DNA are real, whether
i. by self-perpetuating organo-chemistry alone, or
ii. by self-perpetuating organo-chemistry by design.

It is the astonishing self righteousness and intellectual arrogance of atheist secularists that is the real danger.

Very rarely do these 'experts' display any philosophical acumen, preferring to trade heavily on words like 'indoctrination' , as if teaching could occur apart from some body of doctrine, analogous to students discovering the periodic table from scratch; 'choice' as if this didn't imply choice FOR some end; and 'democratic' as if that were an absolute good like it was in 1933;'values' the vacuous organisational buzz word par excellence - a veritable polytheism of the things, Platonic entities that initiates like Dr Doig select for us, from their gnostic/privileged epistemelogical vantage point.

One of these gnostics advertised on the Rationalist Australia blog is the physicist Krauss and his book 'Universe from Nothing' - a philosophically inept project to redefine nothing as really something!

Leaving aside that the nothing in “why something and not the absence or negation of all things” is not some reality but an object existing only in the intellect by our negating all things, Krauss' argument defines “nothing” as the absence of particles, energy, or space, which means that being is particles, energy and space; i.e. to exist is to be material, or at least physical. But that is just garden-variety Materialism assumed from the start. As a challenge to theism, therefore, all Krauss’s argument amounts to is “if you assume materialism, there are no non material entities, like God.”

And if being is particles, energy, and space, that is, that materialism is true, then isn’t it Materialism that gets refuted when we notice that things must come to be from nothing? Either particles, energy and space are all being, or they are not. If they are not, Krauss is wrong that things come from nothing; but if they are, then Materialism is not an adequate account of all that is causal of physical things, that is, the Materialist world (or physical world) is not causally closed, which usually counts as a refutation of Materialism or Physicalism.

And more, even granting materialism, the evolutionary argument against naturalism/materialism (EAAN) deals a devastating blow to the articles of the rationalist faith ( that Darwinian evolution produces reliable cognitive faculties) the author wants substituted for Christian theism.

So it is upon this incoherence, this 'nothing' that Dr Doig presumes to launch the souls of vulnerable children?

Would it be fair for parents to simply respond “On your bike Ms. Doig. Please take your unwarranted faith in rationalism, groundless trust in fasionable secularism, do some philosophy http://edwardfeser.blogspot.com.au/2011/07/so-you-think-you-understand.html and exercise 'choice' on your own children'? We prefer a true democracy and give votes to our ancestors and the yet to be born.”

"Whereas the people of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland, and Tasmania, humbly relying on the blessing of Almighty God, have agreed to unite in one indissoluble Federal Commonwealth under the Crown of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and under the Constitution hereby established:"