Comments by "ncwordman" (@ncwordman) on "How "Liberal" Colleges Brainwash You" video.
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Intelligent design isn't science. So, no. As for the "cosmic fluke," I know it's hard to wrap your mind around, but a lot can happen over the course of billions of years. Think of how much you've changed in the few decades since you were born, or how much society has changed during those decades; think of how quickly mold and dirt accumulate, if you don't clean it; or how quickly music comes in style, and goes out of style.
Now multiply all of those things by a 100, then a thousand, a million, hundreds of millions, and then billions. It's okay if it doesn't make sense. We're mortal, and live for only 100 years, at the most. So we can't see the really really big changes. But all the big stuff is made up of little changes, which we can see.
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@stevekombolis3197 I think one of the reasons you're seeing some resistance here is that intellectual design necessitates a designer. Also, as I've just double checked to confirm, ID is pseudo-science, and assumes that science doesn't explain life on this planet.
One of my favorite writers, Douglas Adams, once talked about a mud puddle. See, as Adams described it: Imagine a mud puddle could become sentient. It looked at its surroundings, and saw that it fit around him perfectly. "It must have been designed for me," said the mud puddle.
I believe the video of that full talk is here on YouTube, as part of Adams' talk with his friend Richard Dawkins.
Besides denouncing science, and saying there must be something more, some other reason, intelligent design falls victim to this mud puddle analogy. Of course, no one designed the hole in which the puddle found itself. Nor did anyone create the water to fill the hole. Whatever you might believe, the bottom line is such thinking ISN'T NECESSARY.
A designer isn't necessary. But, if we stop there for a moment, we find the next big problem with intelligent design: Who is the designer?
If you're curious as to why people here have assumed you were talking about the Christian God, even though you said you weren't Christian, then it's probably because you didn't mention anything about this designer's identity.
I would think not knowing the designer, and, therefore, anything about him/her/it, would quell any further thought about intelligent design. Without knowing who did it, and why, guessing as to what the design is becomes (or should become) impossible.
Sorry, I wrote a lot. But there you go.
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@stevekombolis3197 "And given that there is zero proof that the Big Bang theory is factual"
Sorry, but there is proof. Maybe you didn't get to it in my post. The background radiation from the Big Bang is still here. It's measurable and provable.
You seem like a smart guy: well spoken, articulate, hardly ever (if ever) a single typo. But somehow you missed the whole science thing? It's okay. No one knows everything. It was only this year (my 52nd time around the sun) that I read a Dickens novel.
I have a religious background, but majored in physics in college. Today I'm a physics teacher, and I write essays on the gospels in my spare time. So I was fortunate that I got to explore science, what it means, and how it's done.
Science doesn't present anything with "zero proof." There are no beliefs in science. Nothing to "buy." It's based on experimental data, proven by mathematics, and checked by a community of who knows how many scientists around the world.
You can still not "buy it," if you want. Believe whatever you like. But if it's knowledge you crave, and not some idea some joker cooked up on the internet, then science is the only game in town.
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@stevekombolis3197 "If the religious or supernatural component is removed I don't understand why it would even be considered controversial as one possible explanation"
Because intelligent design is pseudo science, like astrology, phrenology, alchemy. Don't get me wrong, Isaac Newton was an alchemist, and Johannes Kepler was an astrologer. But their work began the scientific method, and so was still partly entrenched in the old ways.
Also, science doesn't have beliefs. Science does ask, Is it possible? But then it asks, Is there evidence? And, if there is, then that evidence has to be proven that it wasn't gathered via any form of bias. In this way, the scientific method does away with the human tendency to find what you're looking for: confirmation bias.
Steve, you are obviously intelligent. If I had to estimate, I'd say you're smarter than I am. But I hope you're not so sure of yourself that you're unwilling to start over. And I say that because I really think that's what you need to do.
All knowledge is based on axioms: a starting assumption. If your axiom is incorrect, then everything you derive from it will also be incorrect. I've faced this myself. I've had to start over.
I think you would love science: endless, factual knowledge. I strongly recommend you read Carl Sagan. He was my best (book) teacher. Anything by him will do, but I very much suggest you start with "The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark."
It's the real thing. Good luck. :)
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@stevekombolis3197 No need to apologize for the length. I've read Moby Dick, Cervantes, and the Three Muskateers. :) That's some serious length. haha
Okay, what happened before the big bang? What caused the big bang? Hold onto your hat.
One thing the Bible got right about creation is that, before it happened "there was void." Einstein showed, in his General Theory of Relativity, that mass bends the three dimensions of space into a fourth dimension: time.
Imagine a couch cushion with no one sitting on it. There's a TV remote resting on the cushion, which doesn't bend the cushion in any appreciable way, because it's not heavy enough. Then you sit near the remote, on the cushion, and the remote "falls into" the "well" created by your weight.
The remote is us; the person sitting on the cushion is the sun/planet (or other massive object); the cushion is space; and the well is time.
So there was no time until the massive object sat on the couch. I know that's hard to imagine. But Einstein's math has been verified. Time passes slower the further out of that well we travel. Time actually passes slower on mountain tops than at sea level.
The well is actually made by gravity, and therefore called a gravity well.
Therefore, there was no time until the big bang. So there was no "before," during which anything could happen.
See how weird science is? And this is peanuts compared to how nutty and awesome Quantum Mechanics is.
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@stevekombolis3197 Hopefully you'll see this reply too. In regards to the idea of the big bang happening before the proof, and what the proof is:
The scientific method begins with a hypothesis. This is just a "what if" idea. It's not a belief though, because that what-if needs proof. It's not just accepted. Sometimes the proof takes a while. Our imagination has always been light years ahead of our technology.
Eventually the background radiation was discovered, and the expansion of the universe. The expansion can be measured by the light quality of the images. When we look out into space, especially deep space, we're looking backward into time. That's because light from an image takes time to reach us.
The speed of light is (roughly) 670 million miles per hour. Even given that dizzying speed, "space is big" (as Douglas Adams put it), "really big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind bogglingly big it is."
It's so big that, even with that crazy speed of light, it still takes time to go through the massive distances of space.
For example: Light from the sun takes 8 and 1/3 minutes to reach us. The sun is (on average) 93 million miles away. That distance is (roughly) 11,000 earth diameters, or 11,000 earths side by side. In comparison, the light from the moon takes 1.3 seconds to reach us. See the difference?
Now, if we keep going, the light that we see is showing us an ever-increasingly older image. You can look into this proof further by reading about the red shifting of light.
The point is that scientists started with a hypothesis: the big bang. Then they needed proof. They eventually got the proof. That's science. And that's not what pseudo science does. So the big bang was never pseudo science.
So, space is expanding. What's the center? Here's the weird part, everything is expanding away from everything else. This can be understood by imagining a balloon being filled with air. If you took a sharpie, and made black dots all over that balloon, before blowing it up, then you'd see each dot as expanding away from every other dot.
If we walk that expansion backward in time, eventually we'd reach the point akin to a balloon with no air in it. And that's where the balloon analogy falls apart, because, with the big bang, there wasn't even a deflated balloon. Or someone to fill it with air. There wasn't any time or any space. So there were no dimensions.
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