To shift tack slightly, I certainly agree with you that Dawkins oversteps his authority and based purely on secondhand accounts, it sounds like Hawking has also in his recent book (though I'm willing to allow a certain license given the desire to sell books).

I don't agree that science is so easily broken up into 'basic' and 'esoteric' though. My experience is admittedly extremely limited - I only got to the basic level in physics, nonetheless I'm aware that most of what I learnt was "not quite right". I would be very hesitant if any of my scientific musings were criticised by Max Raker for instance. Even if what he said seemed to go exactly counter to what I'd been taught - I'd tend to err on the side of "I'm probably wrong". Popular expositions are enormously valuable and I think this is especially true of any endeavour to ensure christians are well informed given the tendency of people to crossover from religion speculation to scientific speculation and vice versa. I wouldn't go as far to say that good popularisers are good scientists though - my own personal bias is that there's a negative correlation.

You are right. Reality harbors a well known atheistic bias.

Haha. I haven't been chased away, although I want to be careful not to get too involved in heated debates about god and religion. I don't use an alias and while I have no problem admitting that I do not believe in supernatural beings, I also don't want to insult any friends/acquaintances who do.

They state up front their view that life requires divine intervention. They also make mention of this later in the podcast. To me, that's a bias because there is no evidence to show this to be the case. The best that can be said is that we don't know what is required for life to originate. And just because we don't know doesn't mean divine intervention is the answer. When something is unknown in science you admit it and keep testing and searching. When a religious person doesn't know an answer to something they tend to go with the default answer that it must be god. Again, I consider that a bias.

Another thing that I think is vastly misunderstood by people such as yourself and bunny is that no one is looking to avoid god as an answer. Bunny said that there is bias on both sides, but I don't see it. Nothing would be more exciting to the scientific community than the discovery of a supernatural being! I myself, would be incredibly excited by such news. But until there is a reason to postulate one, I think it's best left out of the conversation.

Lastly, they allude a couple of times to papers stating this or that when making a point, but make no mention of which papers they're talking about or who wrote them. That was also a bit of a conversation stopper for me.

Btw- I did see some other links to podcasts on RTB that had interesting titles. I'd also like to listen to those when I have time. So thanks for pointing out the site. I'm not trying to avoid god as an answer. I just think it's best to remain neutral and let the evidence lead us where it may.

Glad to see MR was wrong again.

And I see I misjudged your attitude, partly a product of being dumped on by some of the regulars here. I tend to get in defensive mode in these threads and don't always distinguish the character of a disagreement.

They don't have a lot of time on the podcasts so they don't cite a lot of references. In their written work, both on site and in their books, they have extensive footnotes.

In their old Creation Update live podcasts, which is archived on site, they provide show notes and in them they not only cite references but often link to them.

I assure you they read many, many professional journals and though their approach is from a Christian perspective (remember, RTB is a ministry - they are speaking to Christians to explain and promote science and to non-Christians to explain why faith and science are not contradictory) they are also competent scientists.

He doesn't claim to understand any science right? He talks about cosmology, but he is only going by what the experts say because he doesn't have a good grasp of even undergrad topics like general relativity? He would probably be horrified that you are his representative here, if he is a normal reasonably smart dude.

Yeah, that line is correct and a few of the others are as well. Nothing about where life could form was correct and nothing was correct that adressed the post you were responding to. There isn't any consensus about abiogenesis, that was borderline retarded as it has never been observed and is not close to understood. Unclear again if you are making stuff up or are quoting bad sources.

My line was taken from news sources that were quoting the discovery team. So now you're saying you're right and Vogt is wrong?

Edit:

Maybe you are not avoiding God as an answer, I don't know, but there are many people that are in fact avoiding God as an answer. I would bet everything I own that Dawkins is avoiding God as an answer. If you do not see that atheism != objective then you really need to wake up. I don't mean that to be an insult, but people like Dawkins are no better and no more objective than a YEC fundie.

This is a very, very sleazy tactic because it requires me to go back and research a thread from long ago, while you are just stating what you thought I said. You can't even accurately state what I am saying in this thread so it is pretty insane to even try from some old thread. But since you are well you, here we go

On the truth of christianity ChrisV wrote

You asked for evidence. I wrote

This is a true statement. I do not know any christians doing research in my field. They either do not exist, or I do not know of them. This is also not meant to be a proof. It is something that makes christians actually being the best at logical inquiry very unlikely, of course with infinite fine tunings anything can be true.

I made a further clarification here

This is a slightly stronger statement. Here I am going out of my field and saying that I am not aware of a christian who has a complete understanding of a subfield of math or high energy/string physics in 2009. Again, this could be because they do not exist or because I don't know who these christians are or because Witten is secretly a christian and has not told anybody. Also understand the strength of this statement. Understanding "physics or math in 2009" does not mean they could do undergrad homework sets, I mean they could follow and contribute to modern highly technical research. People like Gell-Mann and Weinberg likely are not able to because they are too old and even admit that they can't follow any of the the harder good Hep-Th papers on the Arxiv.

You post
This is off course wrong on 2 accounts. I have never heard of this guy, so my statement is still correct. That was the troubling part to me because that is very obvious logic, The set of people I know (which is what I am talking about) has no members who I do not know. He also has not published anything in math in 20 years, so there is no reason to think he is still following any subfield to be an expert in 2009. Also, my resume is as good as his and in fact much better because I couldn't find anything online for him where as I have a few papers which have been heavily cited (atleast by grad student standards) He is at a bit of a disadvantage here because older papers didn't get cited as much and he anything he wrote was pre internet so it is harder to find anything he actually wrote in the first place.

I of course never said anything about "basic math", you seem to have made that up yourself. By your definitions, I'm sure there are grade schoolers that could do advanced math. I said understand physics and math in 2009, which means they can fully follow current research on a particular subfield. 90% of living Harvard math/physics PhDs cannot do that and the further away your PhD was, the less likely it is you are one. The only people who got PhDs 20+ years ago that can do this are all full faculty at good schools.

Wat? Where did they say that life could only exist on some narrow strip? Where did they say that there is a scientific consensus on abiogenesis? I already said parts of it were correct, but the parts related to life were still totally wrong.

The "paper" on the anthropic principle was impossible for me to judge because it was a response to some Tippler book I have never read. Craig may be correct and Tipler was using the anthropic principle incorrect or Tippler's popular level book could have gone over craig's head. Nothing craig said rebutted the Susskind/Guth anthropic thinking and it wasn't even trying to. You really didn't seem like you are able to understand the susskind lanscape to begin with, which was somewhat surprising because I thought anybody could understand it, but that probably wasn't the first or last time you have destroyed my expectations on what it is possible to not understand.

On this and the previous 2 posts:

I've shown you wrong all 3 times, I'm going to let others decide who is right, but I'm not going to discuss it with you any further, I'm just glad I decided not to hold my breath.

Edit: I have some others but since you think anyone proving you wrong is sleazy I will desist.

So somebody who just walks around not committing to anything is like the perfect thinker to you? Maybe 1+1=2 or 1+1=3+i or 1+1=cat.... anybody that favors one over the other is no better than a YEC fundie.

No, if you actually quote my previous posts, it is very much allright. If you just say, "Well you like Hitler so you clearly suck" without providing a post where i said that, that is sleazy.

It has nothing to do with being committed. It has to do with being dogmatic.