From: Austin Ziegler <halostatue@...>
Date: 2007-04-01T03:33:41+09:00
Subject: Re: [OT] On banning (Was: New presentation on Ruby)

On 3/31/07, ara.t.howard@noaa.gov <ara.t.howard@noaa.gov> wrote:
> On Sat, 31 Mar 2007, Eleanor McHugh wrote:
> > On 31 Mar 2007, at 12:49, Josef 'Jupp' Schugt wrote:
> >> For well over 100 years there used to be an overwhelming consent in
> >> the scientific world to not even consider "design" as part of an
> >> explanation of any observation made. Now the creator is back.
> > Yes, well both sides of that argument are equally as illogical. As far as I'm
> > aware no one has ever proposed an experiment that can either confirm or deny
> > the existence of a 'creator', and that makes atheism as much a religious
> > belief as theism.
> indeed.  i like this way of thinking about it:
>
> "what science finds to be nonexistent, we must accept as nonexistent; but what
> science merely does not find is a completely different matter... it is quite
> clear that there are many, many mysterious things." -- h.h. the 14th dalai lama

The other way of considering it the way that Dawkins has put it in
_The God Delusion_. Science can't prove that "god" doesn't exist. It
can say a lot about the *likelihood* of the existence of a
god-the-creator, and the *likelihood* is very very low. Dawkins
himself, when pressed, doesn't call himself an atheist as much as a
strong agnostic with significant doubts about the likelihood of the
existence of a god (he calls that "Temporary Agnosticism in
Practice").

He's much less forgiving of the abuse of scientific methods by theists
who assume that a creator's existence is a given and then try to
perform science on that basis.

-austin
-- 
Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * http://www.halostatue.ca/
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               * austin@zieglers.ca