05
Aug
2010
“The Sunset of the State”
This is pretty sweet (HT2 Jason Osborne)…
On a related note, how much would you folks chip in to see Stefan Molyneux debate me on Intelligent Design theory? If the pot breaks $20,000, I bet we could arrange it. Book-signings and karaoke to follow the main event.
Placing the sun at the center of the solar system did not make things suddenly “fall into place.” At its advent, the Copernican system was quite complex and messy.
PSH is right, Galileo was not really neater, and made now sense in a lot of areas, only Newton released his work did things start to fall into place, although even Newton’s model is a crude over simplification.
Matt, you are making no sense. Galileo did not produce any math, or invent any models himself. And, are you accusing Netwon of “crude over simplification” because he worked on an Euclidean plan? Such “crude over simplification” has powered every space mission.
The video seems pretty sound to me, but do at least link to a wikipedia page or whatever so we don’t have to read mere assertions.
Fine. Instead of Copernicus vs Ptolemy, how about Von Mises vs Keynes?
Everybody knows that one.
great youtube channel
I’d love to see that debate. Something tells me Stefan doesn’t like a real challenge though. From what I saw, they had “The Great God Debate” at porcfest, and it was Stefan and two other panelists just shaking their heads in agreement with each other.
Bring it to Pittsburgh, and I’d throw in 5 hundy. My kids can live off the land for a couple weeks.
The video is quite good.
Bob,
I’d like to see the argument you produce in favor of intelligent design. A post or a link to an already existing piece on your view would be appreciated. Briefly, my feelings are that it is a large mistake to assume that intelligent design and evolution are incompatible
Agree with Sean A.
“how much would you folks chip in to see Stefan Molyneux debate me on Intelligent Design theory?”
After debating Intelligent Design I would suggest another equally interesting topic to debate – Stork Theory of Reproduction vs Sex Theory of Reproduction.
This video isn’t just “pretty sweet”: it’s awesome.
You and Stefan debating, that would be quite a treat, regardless of the issue.
Would you debate Theism vs. Atheism with him as well?
SeanA, A lot of Intelligent Design people believe that God used the processes of evolution to “create” the universe and life. Hugh Ross is one. Francis Collins, head of the human genome project is another.
ID is very different from creation science. ID tries to develop a scientific method for determining when design requires intelligence and when it can occur naturally. The theory of evolution fits nicely into ID. Evolutionists have no respect for it, however, calling it “God in the gaps” theory. In other words, if something seems difficult to explain through natural processes, then ID’ers just summon God to fill in what science doesn’t know yet. The idea that God used evolution to “create” is normally called theistic evolution. It seems like a nice blending of faith and science and is very popular with Christians. However, there are a lot of philosophical and theological problems with it, as I have written before.
Creation science on the other hand is an effort to force evolutionary scientists to be honest, which for the most part they are not. Creation science is the “Paul Harvey” of the scientific community. It tells people the “rest of the story”, the science that evolutionists know about but don’t want the public to know because it would damage their faith in the theory of evolution. For example, creation science reveals that paleontologists shop their rock samples around to different labs to get the date they think they should get because different labs will date the rock anywhere from several thousand years in age to several billion. And the same dating methods will date newly formed rocks from volcanoes at billions of years in age. Or the fact that evolutionists use selective breeding, the variation in a genus, as evidence for their idea that it can create a new genus, the scientific evidence for which doesn’t exist. I could go on, but the evidence would fill libraries.
Bob, I listened to the first 1:20 and couldn’t take the piling up of horsecrap any longer. The Ptolemaic system was not “hopeless” — it pretty much worked. There was zero danger to Aristarchus or Copernicus for forwarding heliocentrism. Aristarchus did not even put forward a model, just a guess. Heliocentrism did not make “everything fall into place” — in fact, it brought down a whole coherent cosmological view while leaving basically nothing in its place.
Basically, every single sentence spoken in the first 1:20 was false or seriously misleading. I can only assume the rest will go on in the same vein.
Oh boy. Just for yucks, I forwarded a bit and found the nonsense gets even worse — something about how some people “put aside all their prior preconceptions and started from scratch” — so, social reform rests on a complete and utter impossibility, does it? Someone who actually did such a thing, if it were possible, would find themselves not standing in the light of “pure reason,” but completely incapable of any thought at all.
Oh, and whoever the nitwit speaking is, he doesn’t even realize that retrograde motion is observable in every planet, not just Mars. He’s basing his whole talk on an analogy to a situation he understands at about a fifth-grade level.
In my fifth grade they told me Mars moved that way because God wanted it to.
(BTW it’s Stefan Molyneux. I’m surprised you don’t know that voice.)
Gene,
You write:
“He’s basing his whole talk on an analogy to a situation he understands at about a fifth-grade level.”
It’s a mistake to infer from the fact that he explains something to about a fifth-grade level, that he only understands that thing at about a fifth-grade level.
One ubiquitous claim of alleged experts in public communications is that to achieve maximum mindshare, such communications should be presented at about a sixth-grade reading/comprehension level. Maybe you’re a you’re a year off in your evaluation of his presentation’s grade level.
“retrograde motion is observable in every planet, not just Mars”
For some reason that statement has been bothering me, and I keep coming back to try and figure out why.
I’ve figured out why.
You’re throwing out “retrograde motion is observable in every planet, not just Mars:” as if this in some way indicted Molyneux’s case.
It doesn’t. Molyneux is clearly mentioning Mars in the specific context of THAT planet’s apparent retrograde motion being the problem that put Kepler on the track of re-explaining the solar system, which is exactly what happened (Kepler was Brahe’s assistant, and Brahe assigned him the problem of explaining the Martian orbit).