BUSH'S LIPS ARE MOVING. WHAT DOES THAT MEAN?

Bush is campaigning the country, telling us how well things are going in Iraq. Well, here's the real story: REAL STORY.


HERE'S A LITTLE ESSAY I WROTE ABOUT CREATION ?S?C?I?E?N?C?E?

Recently I fired off an email to an acquaintance in which I discussed the problem of men who call themselves scientists even though they make a mockery of the scientific methodology.

Dear Dave,

You’re right, our discussion is unfair as I do have time to sit and think and read almost every day, but my volunteer duties are mounting up. So I’m trying to stick to one point every email so that they’re shorter. This is my thinking on “creation science”.

My hypothesis is that the men who support creation science claim to be scientists, but their minds don’t work like scientific minds because they support hypothesis over theory which no real scientist would do. Therefore, I can honestly and without prejudice discredit anything they have to say. Here’s what I mean.

Creation scientists believe there is some force outside time and space, which they name “god”, which created all the matter in the universe. That is their “hypothesis”. They present absolutely no experimental data to support their hypothesis; that’s why it’s called an hypothesis. These “creation scientists” lay the proof of their claim in the authority of the writings in “one” book, and literary claims, true or false, are not scientific and experimental evidence.

Now, a true “scientific finding”, as you know, must stand the test of peer review and be capable of duplication by a second party before any hypothesis can be proven true in the scientific community. And, of course, evolution is not an experiment capable of being duplicated. Humankind is still right in the middle of the experiment, but we can observe “change” and observe the experiment as it goes on around us in things like continental drift, the movement of stars, volcanoes and other natural acts, and we can pick up the evidence of the animal part of the experiment in fossils and other signs of it all around us now.

So, evolution is far beyond being an hypothesis; it’s a theory. Some in science are ready to say that enough proof exists to call evolution a proven fact, but, for the sake of this discussion, I’ll stick with the term “theory” to bow to your side. Still, evolution has so much evidence that it fills up drawers and closets in departments of science all over the world. Evolution explains so many other sciences too. Everything in biology is explained by and makes sense by evolution. The findings from the fact of “continental drift” fits with evolution. DNA proves evolution. The salty, oceanic contents of human blood chemistry is explained by evolution. To take evolution out of science would be the same as taking god out of the Bible; neither would make sense. Almost our entire understanding of how the natural world works would cease to make sense without evolution in it. But, still, that isn’t the point.

My point is that any scientist who claims to be a scientist (1) starts with an hypothesis, (2) makes observations and creates experiments to see if his hypothesis has any basis in fact, and only then (3) calls it a theory or discards it as false. Only after his peers (4) review it and also come up with experimental verification does an hypothesis arrive to the force of the truth. And even then, scientists only claim to have the truth as the evidence shows it to be now. To a true scientist, the facts of the natural world will always be open to further interpretation and experimentation.

The point is that no real scientist can put an hypothesis before a theory. That would be the same as putting two before one in counting objects. Ergo, creation scientists who put their unproven “hypothesis of creation” before the “theory of evolution” don’t operate as true scientists with the scientific method and their claims must be discarded. Ironic as it may sound, the only scientist who could be trusted to honestly prove the existence of god would have to be an atheistic one.

Who knows? Maybe in the future, real scientists, working with dark matter or anti-matter or string theory, etcetera, will come up with a process by which something does come from nothing, and if they’re real scientists, they will tell us that and seek peer review and corroborating evidence for their claims. Until that happens, my mind remains open to the claims of the Christian book, but for now I remain an atheist.


NEW CAR

I bought a new car and turned in my Ford Aspire at about 128,000 miles, one of the best little cars I ever owned. It's still getting 30mpg and cruising along but some uninsured driver wanged my door pretty badly while I was parked the other day, and I've been idly test driving some newer cars on the spur of the moment. And a funny thing happened on my way to the dealer. . . . Tell me, George, what happened?. . . Well I decided after my weekly bank trip to drive out about ten miles to the Spokane Kia dealership east of Spokane on Interstate 90 to test drive a Kia Rio. . . What happened then, George? . . . I pulled up to the very front door of the Kia place and turned the key in my ignition and broke the key off, deep in the ignition. A salesman came out, and I said, "I need to use your phone to call a locksmith. I came here to test drive a Kia, not to buy." I told him I thought I was going to drive my Aspire for another year. He said, "You're driving a Kia right now." Then he showed me on the VIN that my Aspire was made in Korea by Kia. Later, after the drive, I told him truthfully that the checkbook was with my wife 30 miles away, then when I was rummaging in my glove box for something, I found the new box of checks which I picked up two weeks previously and forgot in the glove compartment. At that point, I bowed to coincidence and gave in and paid cash by check for a new Rio, about 8,600 dollars, and I've got a full 5 year warranty, plus 100,000 miles of body warranty after that. That's okay but not as impressive as it sounds when you come to think of it. Still they'll tow me for any reason for the next five years if I run into any trouble. If I get another 125,00 miles out of this Kia, I and my car may reach our death beds at about the same time.
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"I'm going to speak my mind because I have nothing to lose." —S.I. Hayakawa (He was, I think, Chancellor at Berkeley when Mario Savio's freedom of speech protest was in full swing. I could be wrong.)