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Author | Topic: Crop circles and intelligent design | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
There are items which we do know for certain, and can count as fact. E.g. pure water at standard pressure boils at 100 C, the bus pulled away just as I got to the stop and I didn't board that one.
There are items which we are pretty damn sure of. E.g. Gravity is related in some way to mass and distance, biological diversity is the result of genetic mutation, selective pressure and time. There are items which we cannot test. E.g. existence of Aries, Thor, or any other god of your choosing. But in between the last two are things which we haven't really bothered to investigate in any great detail ... but dismiss because they seem unlikely. ... which is what IDists do. Is the suggestion that aliens make crop circles ruled out because it seems dumb, or because extensive investigation has ruled it out as a possibility -- by refuting something related to the claim?
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Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
How do we know that crop circles don't pre-date us?
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Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
You ... you mean magic leprechauns are NOT responsible for gravity ?!?
As to drawing stuff to us for communication ... maybe they think that's all we can understand ... oh wait, you can only really see them from the sky so maybe they're not even intended for us. Maybe the aliens are so advanced that they view us the same way we view dolphins -- entertaining and sort of smart, but nothing special. Do you have a reference for the refutation of the exploded stems, and elongated thingamagigs and the iron spheres -- unfortunately I can only find the pro-non-human-origin data at the moment. Never mind if not, I'll just keep looking.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
If the sequence I stated is 'incorrect' as you said (and which I agree with) then the fact that we CAN create crop circles is not evidence of crop circles being man-made.
That's all I was saying in relation to that point. I cannot imagine them being anything other than man-made ... but niether that, nor our ability to create them is evidence.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
jar writes: We can say several things that increase our confidence. First, crops did not exist before us.
But presumably the plants that we later cultivated (or something very like them) was. Savanna's of open grasses etc. So not very helpful.
Second, we have about 6000 years of history with no mention of crop circles.
As I have found recently it depends on who you ask and how they interpret things (hmmm ... that sounds familiar from somewhere). There are suggestions (I haven't corroborated them mind) that Ancient Egyptians mention something which could be crop circles, and there are 17th century books that appear to describe the circles in the crops (again I haven't dug that deep ... possibly all a pile of non-crop-related-farming-waste).
Third, ALL evidence of crop circles begins in the 70s and so we see crop circles as something less than 50 years old.
Not necessarily ... Sorry, the evidence says with a very high degree of confidence that crop circles only existed since human pranksters.
Human pranksters have been about for several thousand years though .... Same story, nudder verse. We have evidence that crop circles are man made and modern only and no evidence of any other possible way they could be made. The main thing that I have seen with this thread is that the rigour required for the evidence of human manufacture of crop-circles is far less than that demanded of creationist 'science' (and I include ID there -- possibly contentiously). Does any other explanation simply exceed the credibility threshold for cultural reasons? Why do we discount aliens? Personally I cannot imagine why an alien would come all this way to draw a crop circle ... but then I cannot figure why people would (secretly in the night ... never taking credit for some beautiful art). The likelihood of non-human intelligent life in the milky way is not small given the 200-400 milliard () stars that we estimate. So (unless there is some very hard, objective evidence) why DO we discount aliens? I would suggest that even if we had several independent witnesses saying they saw aliens drawing a crop circle whilst partying with a keg of their favorite tipple that the scientific community would discount it instantly and without evidence. But why? Arguments from incredulity are not acceptable in ides/theories that conflict against current scientific wisdom, so why can they be used to support the status quo?
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Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
The explanations of why are all basically arguments from incredulity based upon fallacious projections.
Being unable to accept any other possibilities is not proof that they are not credible.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
'in principle be wrong' : it's the repeatability that does the trick though (although we cannot rule out that the universe is actually random and without order and we are just in a pocket that seems orderly at the moment I suppose).
In (1) in your post .... since we don't know what to look for we cannot say there is no evidence. In regards to (2) just because we can create something doesn't mean that's how it came about. Alien crop circles are also no more evidentially supported than human-made ones if all the evidence is 'we can create them ourselves.' I'm NOT supporting alien-crop-circles ... I'm questioning the ruling out of a suggestion without investigation -- I thought that was the domain of the YEC not the scientist.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
It must be in wikipedia ... surely
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Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
We know that humans can and do make crop circles. Until there is an evidential basis for considering some other source of crop circles I would suggest that deep skepticism towards baseless claims about aliens, pixies or any other such source is more than justified.
But this is actually hitting the guts of my continued posting! How can we rule out something without evidence that refutes it? We can state that it's not believable ... but that isn't a scientific position. Stephen Hawkin once said 'I would never say that time travel was impossible, because the person I speaking to might be from the future' or something like that. I take that to mean that he cannot rule it out as a possibility due to lack of evidence/knowledge. That is a scientific position. We don't need an evidential reason for considering some other cause .... the potential causes (hypotheses) are simply ideas based upon thoughts about an observation. They have to be worked into a form that meets the criteria of scientific investigation (which is NOT the case with Alien Crop Circles so far as I know) and then figure out detailed observations that would be contrary to that hypothesis .... i.e. try to disproove it. That's not what has happened in regard to crop circles ... no investigation has ever really been done because the opinion is automatically 'human pranksters'
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Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
What I am saying is that once an idea is on the table, then it must be analysed approriately if rejection of it is to be considered scientific.
Pulling ideas out of ones arse -- that's called brainstorming isn't it? And that IS considered to be an approriate method for generating ideas. OK so one would rank the brainstorming results afterwards ... but during a brainstorm one has to be non-critical and record everything. If no-one (bar me) is saying 'impossible' then I'm happy. If what they are saying is that the whole alien idea (or goblins or highly advanced bacterium or ... ) is unbelievable from their own cultural perspective ... then I'm happy. What people are saying is that based upon some very loose evidence that crop circles can be made by people, that they all are. -- which is not a position that should go unchallenged. If it did none of us would be here discussion creation at all.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
However, later on you basically agree with my position that it's a matter of balance of evidence rather than a matter of fact. And at the end of the day that's all I've been saying. As for no evidence of aliens ... you list a few possibilities which have not been found -- which is good. But we know nothing about an aliens and so do not even know what to look for. If we find anomalies that cannot be explained by human-pranksters the stance is to find ways that those anomalies don't matter ... hardly scientific.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
Does 'science' rely on:
1) Evidence to support 'an idea' OR 2) Lack of evidence against 'an idea' ?
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Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
And that's where the unflasifiable bit about aliens comes from ... no predictions about what we should see ...
But ... positive evidence of one proposition is not refutation of another proposition -- yes? It stacks the evidence in favour of the one that has positive evidence (provided that there is no refutation of predictions based upon that proposition). So we don't consider aliens as a fruitful line of enquiry because no one can posit expectations along those lines. ... which is exactly why we should discount ID ... a lack of coherent predictions.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
I quite like snickers .... nutty
"Nobody that I have seen in this thread has treated 'humans create allcrop circles' as an absolute unassailable fact - so your criticisms in this regard are ill-aimed. And that has been my point since the outset." "It is a fact that humans create [some] crop circles." -- I agree. "It is not a fact that aliens do." -- No-one knows. "It is a fact that all crop circles where we have identified the culprit, the culprit is human. " -- I agree. "From this, the theory that 'all crop circles are human creations' follows" -- No it doesn't. The last bit is as much a leap of faith as stating that all crop circles are formed by aliens -- or that life on Earth was created by a galactic warthog with the breath from its nostrils. It is not a correct inference to say that because some sub-set of a group was formed by a specific mechanism, that all elements were.
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Peter Member (Idle past 1501 days) Posts: 2161 From: Cambridgeshire, UK. Joined: |
The phrase 'positive evidence' does mean something to me ... but making rash inferences from a very weak item of any kind of evidence is unwise.
It's exactly what ID does. That's what this thread was about -- I think.
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