Re: Dembski and Nelson at MIT and Tufts
Massie (mrlab@ix.netcom.com)
Mon, 05 Apr 1999 08:35:37 -0700
Pim van Meurs wrote:
>
> Moorad:I asked you if you were a working scientist and you did not answer. For
> your information, there is scientific prejudice even in areas not as
> contested as in the area of the question of origins. I have experienced that
> and known of many cases in my 35 years of publishing in scientific journals.
> I believe in a Creator and my papers get published. That proves that my
> ideas and work are acceptable by the scientific community. In areas of
> research where new ideas are proposed, then the going gets more difficult.
> People oppose new ideas. It is the nature of the beast.
>
> You are right, scientists are skeptical towards new ideas but that is a far cry from saying that they suppress new ideas.
>
> Moorad: I say again: WE WILL NEVER KNOW HOW GOD CREATED. WE CAN ONLY SPECULATE, THAT IS ALL WE CAN DO.
>
> How can you be so sure of that ?
>
> Moorad: You say that we will figure out the question of origins. Let me quote you a
> verse: "Professing to be wise, they became fools," Rom. 1:22.
>
> I am sure that one can find a verse in the bible to support whatever one wants to believe. That however is not very convincing.
>
> Moorad: Speaking of ignorance. Do you know the importance and problem involved in
> determining the values of fundamental constants? Have you ever published a
> paper on this problem? Do you know the names of famous physicists who have
> worked on this problem without success?
>
> ROTFL, and the relevance of this is ?
>
> Moorad: If it is not obvious to you that the theory of how life came from nonliving
> matter is astronomically more difficult than that of the values of the
> fundamental constants, then you do not know what matter is nor what life is
> nor what a fundamental constants is.
>
> Your comparisson is meaningless unless you can show that the theory of life is astronomically more difficult than the fundamental constants. I would say quite the opposite.
**********
I am trained as a scientist with the best and brightest. Lets divide
scientists into those whose careers are centered arround the issues of
evolution being the central theme. We certainly include in this set
most biologists, palentologest, etc. These individuals have a
fundamental interest in the origins question.
The rest primarily in my experinece don't care about the origins debate.
I remember debatin the issue of whether the costants of the universe
where in fact constant at length and the question of God or not was not
part of the issue. Definition of a scientist to me is a person looking
for a grant. Who cares what some philosophy professor believes if you
are trying to understand the process for some chemical reation or why
the speed of light is a constant. The cosmologists (all 100 of them)
have a philsophical interest in the origins debate but it is tangential.
So, when I hear someone say that scientisits this or that I just don't
know how that the speaker has such broad information on such a diverse
set of people and who primarily are narrowly focused on their careers
and could care less about the questions of origins.
Bert Massie