"Why doesn't America believe in evolution?" - NewScientist.com (user search)
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  "Why doesn't America believe in evolution?" - NewScientist.com (search mode)
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Author Topic: "Why doesn't America believe in evolution?" - NewScientist.com  (Read 17811 times)
True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
Ernest
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« on: August 21, 2006, 10:30:51 PM »

Actually I have to disagree with angus somewhat.  Science is a faith, it just is that it is one that does not have to conflict with religion.  It is a faith that assumes that the universe is an orderly place that functions using predictable laws.  It assumes that for those portions of the universe that one can apply repeatable experiments to, the results of those experiments can yield insights into how the universe functions.  The difficulty that some people have with long-term evolution, global warming, etc. comes from the fact that to date we have conducted but a single non-repeated experiment of which we have collected only partial data.  They rely upon experimental models that work on the limited scale we have experienced and have been able to subject to the gold standard of repeated experimentation, but the history of science is replete with examples of theories that function well on one set of data but fail to predict accurately once one extrapolates past the conditions under which the data were obtained.
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True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)
Ernest
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« Reply #1 on: August 23, 2006, 10:01:53 PM »

I strongly believe in liberalism as an optimistic ideology, with its ultimate tenet being the fundamental goodness of the human spirit and of people in general. Besides that idealism, it's simply good politics to be positive and not insult people.

Actually liberalism is pessimistic in nature.  It assumes that power corrupts and therefore to help the common man the state should be given as little power as possible, with what power it does have being used to prevent the use and accumulation of power by narrow interests.

Wait a moment, you probably meant the new fangled version that believes that in order to help the common man, we need to concentrate power in bureaucrats and the like.  It certainly is optimistic in assuming that those bureaucrats will be both knowledgable and motivated primarily by the common good.

About the only thing that unites the two liberalisms is the tenet that the good of the common man should be the primary concern of how to organize a government.
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