h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Doc J.

Many, many, many congrats.

Such length, and so many gonads.

We are humbled.

The wean.

This seems interesting. Mind if I but in to watch where this goes.

Actually I think it depends on which bible your using, I mean in the historical Hebrew language the word used "I am told" means long periods of time, and later got the definition of days as well. When the christians translated the old testament into greek they used the newer meaning for some words.

Don't know if its true, its just what I have been told. An please don't jump on me, I am no christian, I believe in God and I believe that evolution may have been the way we where created,as a kind of guiding the process in the right direction kind of way.

Anyway I am still trying to get my head around jesus, Jehovah, John etc when their is no J in the Hebrew alaphbet.

As for should they stick to what the book says or mix it with science, you might as well let them, christians have been adding and changing to the bible for thousands of years, gay marriages, female bishops etc all being current changes which give time will become articles of faith.

Adib

Semantics, yes; a fact is a fact and a theory is not; quite simple really. I've been thinking about selling jars of 21% Phlogiston on E-bay. Good luck in your PhD quest, maybe you can figure out how the eye evolved. If it did. Just kidding.

Yeah, and organic means it's made of carbon, so all the veg in the supermarket is organic

'a fact is a fact and a theory is not; quite simple really'

Right. In a sadly limited vocabulary.

'I've been thinking about selling jars of 21% Phlogiston on E-bay'

Amd I've been thinking of selling tickets to this thread for people who need a butt massage.

>>"'I've been thinking about selling jars of 21% Phlogiston on E-bay'"

Surely that would be a bit ar$e-about-face, given what the phlogiston theory actully was?
Oxygen was considered as *dephlogisticated air* by Priestley.

LMAO

It wasn't my intention to humble, only to make a point of fact clear. Definitions are what they are, and whether or not an individual's dictionary has enough words depends on that person's budget, or that of the local library, or their access to the internet.



There is a reason why Webster's newest production requires twenty volumes-that pocket version some people have simply won't cut the mustard. This is equally true for several 'collegiate' versions as my wife sadly found out while pursuing her third master's. She once again reverted to my old Webster's, even though it's outdated, and burned her others in the fireplace. If an individual chooses to assign a definition or meaning to a word that's unusual then that person is doing themselves a disservice. In a court of law this could lead to fines and serving time.



Neat trick, selling something that's already free: go for it! You seem the type to try and put one over on people.



Hey, butt masseurs/masseuses, get your own towel!

'as my wife sadly found out while pursuing her third master's'

humbled again: I stopped after one. (Perhaps ironically, that one was in English.)

'She once again reverted to my old Webster's'

I still use my father's old Webster's Collegiate. When I'm not using the OED.

'If an individual chooses to assign a definition or meaning to a word that's unusual then that person is doing themselves a disservice.'

You were provided with a link which explained the 'usual' meaning of the word in question in the context of science. cf. post # 499



'I've been thinking about selling jars of 21% Phlogiston on E-bay'

'Neat trick, selling something that's already free: go for it! You seem the type to try and put one over on people. '

Phlogiston theory corrected [my 10th grade Earth Science teacher is also getting this information, he was the source of the previously posted explanation]; from various internet sources:

"The theory was developed by J. J. Becher late in the 17th century and was extended and popularized by Georg Ernst Stahl, who declared the rusting of metal to be a combustion process. The theory holds that all flammable materials contain phlogiston (derived noun form of the Greek phlogistos, meaning flammable), a substance without color, odor, taste, or weight that is liberated in burning. Once burned, the "dephlogisticated" substance was held to be in its "true" form, the calx.

The theory is related to alchemical notions of the classical elements: fire, water, air, and earth. All substances were held to be a combination of these four elements.

"Phlogisticated" substances are those that contain phlogiston and are "dephlogisticated" when burned. Since any substance could be observed to burn for only a limited time with limited air (for instance in a sealed container), air was thought to have a specific capacity for phlogiston.

Joseph Black's student Daniel Rutherford discovered Nitrogen in 1772 and the pair used the theory to explain his results. The residue of air left after burning, in fact a mixture of nitrogen and carbon dioxide, was sometimes referred to as "phlogisticated air", having taken up all of the phlogiston.

Conversely, when oxygen was first discovered it was thought to be "dephlogisticated air", capable of combining with more phlogiston and thus supporting combustion for longer than ordinary air. Phlogiston remained the dominant theory until Antoine Laurent Lavoisier showed that combustion requires oxygen.

Well there goes the E-bay idea. C'est la vie.

...but the key to Lavoisier's success was accurate measurement. (I believe he acquired this tendency from an Accountancy background.)

It is interesting that so-called creation science is entirely qualitative. Quantitative data from ice cores or tree rings or radioactive decay or magnetic reversals or mutation rates and so on is always explained away using a rabbit out of a hat, a bit of adjusting with a hammer, and a lie or two.

The fact that many independent lines of enquiry all converge is a tricky one to dismiss honestly.

The wean.

Nothing in science is a fact. However, there are certain things that are so overwhelmingly true that they can be considered fact. Those include evolution and the processes that evolution occurs by. That does not preclude the possibility that people will discover more processes, or course.

You can quibble about words and strict definitions (which Dr J seems to like to do, with his unabridged dictionary), but when it comes down to it some scientific theories are facts. Science is also tremendously pragmatic, remember, and just wants to get on with it.



Ste

Ditto to all that, Ste.

Also, Natural Selection is the Grand Unifying Theory of the whole science of Biology. Without it, none of Biology makes any sense.

It may be a "Theory", but that's only because people don't call Theories Laws any more.

Darwin called it a Law in that book of his. Perhaps it's time to upgrade the language. After all, it's got a heck of a lot more going for it than things like the "Gas Laws" or "Newton's Laws of Motion" or "The Law of Universal Gravitation" - all of which are pretty good, but not quite right.

The wean.

There's quite a lot of science that is factual but that's another debate. I promise not to go near the theory of relativity. Really.

"She once again reverted to my old Webster's, even though it's outdated, and burned her others in the fireplace."

Ah, the mark of an anti-evolutionist - book burning.

Look, everything said so far is true, for a given value of true. However I feel you're all ignoring the obvious, a wizard did it.

>>"There's quite a lot of science that is factual but that's another debate"

That *does* rather depend what you mean by 'science', and what you mean by 'factual'.

That was the point I was trying to make

<>

My life ... it finally makes sense!!

All hail the wizard!



(or you'll spend eternity in pain and torment)

It also has something to do with whether you actually even have a scoobie or just making up the drivel as it occurs to you. (Not you, personally, Potholer, "you" in general.)

The wean.

I just read an article that claimed that most Christians were totally ignorant (.) of one point about the creation of the world that I thought was fairly obvious. I've only read Genesis once, but it stuck out like a sore thumb to me - there are two conflicting stories about how the earth and Adam and Eve were created. I just filed it under the huge pile of inconsistancies and impossibilities that the bible is already full of, but seeing as how this fact seems to come as a big shock to many fundies, I thought I'd ask you which story you believe...

The one where god created the earth and created Adam and Eve TOGETHER

or

The one where god created life on earth (which already existed), and created Adam out of clay and Eve out of his rib LATER

If the bible is the literal truth, then how can they both be right?

I'll eagerly await your answer