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Originally posted by SignyM:
Skulls confirm we're all out of Africa

LONDON (Reuters) - An analysis of thousands of skulls shows modern humans originated from a single point in Africa and finally lays to rest the idea of multiple origins, British scientists said on Wednesday. ... The genetic evidence has always strongly supported the single origin theory, and now results from a study of more than 6,000 skulls held around the world in academic collections supports this case.
www.reuters.com/article/scienceNews/idUSL1885586220070719

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Originally posted by rue:
"if there is some thing that had no beginning to its existence" etc

Well, then I can posit that the universe had no beginning and was never created - it always was. And voila ! The need for god to explain anything goes away. Does that help?

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Originally posted by fredgiblet:

Bah! The Designer made it to appear that way, can't you tell?

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Originally posted by rue:
Well, when you eliminate everything material as being the provence of science, you are left with that which can't be see, heard, felt, tasted smelled, measured - in other words, with something that has no material existance at all. In which case you are talking about the completely imaginary. Just like my big white furry friend here, Harvery.

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Originally posted by rue:
Personally I'm not convinced of the "big bang" because it has too many internal contradictions.

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But let's say it's true. How do you know that going from a timeless core to an expanding universe to a timeless core again isn't a cycle ? In which case, you can still hold there was no beginning or end.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
I keep asking questions until I can't answer them anymore, so forgive me if I flog my question about science replacing religion.

It seems to me that science has religion pretty much beat when it comes to explaining previously unknowable questions and controlling previously uncontrollable forces, and the one area we have yet to understand is ourselves: How do we recognize and control our societies and memes? Where does our drive for "justice" come from? Where is religious inspiration centred? (The temporal lobe)

It seems to me that insightful scientists will one day be able to explain what religion "does" for us, and be able to create a similarly-functioning system with no reference whatsoever to supernatural beings* (*IMHO is just anthropomorphization -The attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to nonhuman organisms or inanimate objects.) of "the Unknown")

Until then, we're just amateurs who occassionally find the levers of human behavior- fear, greed, awe, cooperation - and accidentally create religions and politics and economies and technologies that answer the questions of the day, whether it is about game, rain, disease, or justice.

But when we discover why people behave the way they do- individually and socially- we will TRULY have the ability to direct our ethics, memes, economies, technologies and societies towards whatever we want. Scary thought, isn't it? To control our collective destiny, and not be able to blame gods or devils or fate or nature for our f*ckups?

One more concept. Rue had said at one point that we are self-domesticated. If we are able to create a society where people's needs and wants are TRULY met- not just our need for food but also for meaning, justice, beauty, adventure, and sacrifice... what will the product of that self-dometication look like?

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Causal

YOU are seriously mistating the science of evolution. I honestly don't know where to begin. There are MANY observable facts that support the theory of evolution - DNA homologies, isotope dating, geology (uplift, deposition, fossil formation), biochemistry (the most recent bing the SINGLE genetic change that stops the 'limb' gene from activating in whales), etc.

There is, as yet, no directly observable suport for many theories supporting the big bang.

Now either you are being snarky, deliberately obtsue, or seriously ignorant.

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Just one question: is it within the realm of possibility that there is some thing that science will never have an answer for?

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Originally posted by SignyM:

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Just one question: is it within the realm of possibility that there is some thing that science will never have an answer for?

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There are MANY things that science will never be able to answer. Not because they're out of the realm of science but because our minds are finite and our comprehension is limited.

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Originally posted by Causal:
And to the better-educated in the room, I would like to know the following. I took a basic astronomy class a few semesters ago in which the professor said that the Big Bang/Big Crunch theory has been pretty well abandoned by most astronomers. He said the continual expansion of the universe is the dominant theory now. Can anybody speak to that?

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Originally posted by rue:
"red-shifted galaxies means that the universe is in the process of expansion"

Not true. You got it bass ackwards. The red shift is the observable phenomenon. The expansion is the theory. I can think of other reasons for a red shift that have nothing to do with expansion.

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Originally posted by fredgiblet:
He is mistaken, the Big Bang theory is following the same path as Evolution in that there were serious problems that have been fixed by new information or modifications to the theory and there are still a few concerns that need to be ironed out but the core of the theory is solid and pretty broadly accepted.

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Originally posted by Causal:
I took a basic astronomy class a few semesters ago in which the professor said that the Big Bang/Big Crunch theory has been pretty well abandoned by most astronomers. He said the continual expansion of the universe is the dominant theory now. Can anybody speak to that?

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Originally posted by Causal
"red-shifted galaxies means that the universe is in the process of expansion"

Originally posted by rue:
Not true. You got it bass ackwards. The red shift is the observable phenomenon. The expansion is the theory. I can think of other reasons for a red shift that have nothing to do with expansion.

Originally posted by Causal:
Being that you seem vastly more interested in beating me than in actually discussing this, you can have your ball.

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Originally posted by Causal:
So what I was trying to find out was, what are astronomer's thinking about the univers's future? Was he correct that the Big Crunch theory has been rejected?

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Originally posted by Causal:
So what I was trying to find out was, what are astronomer's thinking about the univers's future? Was he correct that the Big Crunch theory has been rejected?

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Originally posted by mal4prez:
IMHO, anyone trying to make God arguments out of our understanding of the origin and fate of the universe might get a workout from all the hand-waving, but that's about it.

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Originally posted by Causal:
The question I put to you was this. Many religious believers (though I am not one of them), deny the scientific validity of evolution, thus defying the majority of scientific thinkers. You deride those people as utterly ignorant of all scientific knowledge. Yet you yourself deny the scientific validity of Big Bang cosmology, thus defying the majority of scientific thinkers. How can you deride the one as ignorant an unsicentific (as it clearly seems to be) and defend your own position on cosmology as rational? Red shifted galaxies are just one piece of observable evidence supporting the Big Bang cosmology. So how are you not yourself open to the sorts of charges you level at disbelievers in evolution?

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Originally posted by Causal:
They're just not asking the same questions, so trying to force them into competition is a losing strategy, at best.

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Originally posted by Causal:
I wish there was a jaw-drop emoticon, Citizen.

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Originally posted by rue:
Well, when you eliminate everything material as being the provence of science, you are left with that which can't be see, heard, felt, tasted smelled, measured - in other words, with something that has no material existance at all. In which case you are talking about the completely imaginary. Just like my big white furry friend here, Harvery.

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For instance, I think that science cannot possibly answer the question, "Is there a God?" The reason I think that that is so is because God is by definition immaterial, and the sciences by definition deal only with the materially observable. It is, then, impossible for science to make claims about the question of God's existence. In short, I believe that science is a limited . What are your views on that?

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Originally posted by SignyM:
"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" "What color are dragons?" Just because I can ask a question doesn't mean it needs to be part of an espitemology. If you were to ask "What roles does the concept of 'god' play in society?" then we could talk.

Even the question "What is our purpose"? might be ammenable to scientific enquiry once we figure out what triggers our sense of "purpose" and when we feel we "need" it.

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Originally posted by rue:
That which doesn't address the physical by default addresses the imaginary.

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Originally posted by rue:
"Science deals with the physical. Further, I would say everything physical is beyond the definitive grasp of science. That's b/c science is a collection of models made by the human mind, which are at best poor approximations of the real thing. So I'm not saying that science encompasses the physical. But it does address it.

That which doesn't address the physical by default addresses the imaginary.

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Higher spatial dimensions cannot be measured, but they simplify the natural forces, and are the basis for scientific theories such as superstring.

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Originally posted by SignyM:
"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" "What color are dragons?" Just because I can ask a question doesn't mean it needs to be part of an espitemology. If you were to ask "What roles does the concept of 'god' play in society?" then we could talk.

Even the question "What is our purpose"? might be ammenable to scientific enquiry once we figure out what triggers our sense of "purpose" and when we feel we "need" it.

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Originally posted by rue:
How so?

If it's not physical, then what is it ?

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Originally posted by SignyM:

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Higher spatial dimensions cannot be measured, but they simplify the natural forces, and are the basis for scientific theories such as superstring.

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Higher spatial dimensions help unify our understanding and predictions of observeable phenomena. But their success or failure as a concept- like "electrons" - rests on their ability to match up with the observeable world. Unlike "God".

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Citizen- the fact that we cannot perceive them doesn't make them "outside" of our physical universe, just "outside" of our ability to naturally model them in our brain.

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"How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?" "What color are dragons?" Just because I can ask a question doesn't mean it needs to be part of an espitemology. If you were to ask "What roles does the concept of 'god' play in society?" then we could talk.

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Even the question "What is our purpose"? might be ammenable to scientific enquiry once we figure out what triggers our sense of "purpose" and when we feel we "need" it

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Originally posted by SignyM:
Citizen- the fact that we cannot perceive them doesn't make them "outside" of our physical universe, just "outside" of our ability to naturally model them in our brain.

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Originally posted by rue:
Now, if it can be reasonably shown that life came from non-life, and since it has been shown that life evolves according to the whims of time and circumstance, the religious (specifically biblical) arguments for how things are fall flat. It's not that humans are god's 'special' creation given dominion, or that humans and god have a special historical relationship, or that humans have a 'god given' purpose. Humans are just another animal formed by the same kind of chance that formed everything else.

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Originally posted by antimason:
some of you, like Rue, seem to think that the concept was invented out of thin air, simultaneously by every culture in the world, coincidentally from the dawn of recorded history.

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Originally posted by rue:
"One" is a model - a human idea made to characterize a quality (singleness). (BTW even chimps and monkeys appear to be able to model quantities in the abstract.)

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That begs the question of the meaning "exists". The problem is definitional, not logical.

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If we DEFINE god as being non-material (which is how the definition is trending over the long course of human history) then, by definition, everything which materially exists (the only kind of existence for which we will ever have evidence) is not god.

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"while you may firmly believe that there are no non-physical things, there's no way to prove it finally and conclusively" And that again gets us back to the definitional question of "exists".

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Abstract The Tully–Fisher Relationship (TFR) is utilized to identify anomalous redshifts in normal spiral galaxies. Three redshift anomalies are identified in this analysis: (1) several clusters of galaxies are examined, in which late type spirals have significant excess redshifts relative to early-type spirals in the same clusters; (2) galaxies of morphology similar to ScI galaxies are found to have a systematic excess redshift relative to the redshifts expected if the Hubble Constant is 72 km s−1 Mpc−1; (3) individual galaxies, pairs, and groups are identified which strongly deviate from the predictions of a smooth Hubble flow. These redshift deviations are significantly larger than can be explained by peculiar motions and TFR errors. It is concluded that the redshift anomalies identified in this analysis are consistent with previous claims for large non-cosmological (intrinsic) redshifts.

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im glad you admitted this openly.. it makes my job easier. if humans are just 'another animal' formed by chance, explain why we should be treated differently then?

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