Haredawg, FDA, empirical testing.

When I was in school nobody debated the empirical answer to an empirical question without having the correct answer. On a real life and personal level I have never felt obliged to tell someone they were wrong when I wasnt sure what was right.
Youre right, you dont need to know the answer to know a likely wrong answer when you hear one, but telling someone they are wrong without knowing whats right makes you a jerk AND equally wrong.
[haredawg]

Do you consistently apply this kind of thinking? For example, do you condemn the FDA for requiring health claims of drugs be backed up by clinical data and tests that show not only effectiveness but lack of harm?

If someone came forward with a pill that they did something special to it and they believed it would cure AIDS, the FDA would not allow him to sell it with those claims unless they are backed up by rigorous testing.

I do know that when I hear you screech at folks that its the wrong answer I feel a need to protect who you are attacking as opposed to agree with you. Like your analogy you point out someone elses fault and offer no solution.
[haredawg]

Would you require the FDA to know the cure for AIDS before it could reject a pill claiming to be a cure?

“To kill an error is as good a service as, and sometimes better than, the establishing of a new truth or fact.” – Charles Darwin

haredawg

January 13, 2005

Huh. I addressed that in the rest of the notes I left. But, just for the sake of brevity, asking someone to examine their claim before allowing it for public consumption is considerably different than telling a fellow student that they are just wrong as per your analogy. For one, the FDA example is an’I’m not sure’ not an ‘You’re wrong’.

“asking someone to examine their claim before allowing it for public consumption is considerably different than telling a fellow student that they are just wrong” 1. The student was wrong for a number of reasons. 2. What about sking someone to examine their religious claims before allowing it for public consumption? Would you have a problem with a person that asks for testing of religious claims?

1. Yes the student was wrong, but in your analogy you also claimed not to know the answer either. My point was and is there is no greatness in telling someone they are wrong when you aren’t even attempting to discover what is right. 2. I understand where you going in the first place. You understaqnd we differ on this. I was just arguing with your analogy which, I believe, doesn’t make a valid

point. I know you feel justified in saying religious adherents are wrong, irrational, unscientific … In my mind what you do is snipe, retaliate instead of promote any reparation or movement towards rightness, rationality or scinetific method.

Actually the anonymous note that quotes Darwin sums up my thoughts on that. And I do think that I promote a rationalistic and scientific approach.

Yeah, except you don’t kill errors, you question faith. Darwin, for instance, didn’t believe he “killed” creationism at all. A scientific and rational approach involves proving an hypothesis. To dispel the notion the world was flat is not enough, one has to prove the shape of it to have any credence. We can’t remove something as ephemeral as a belief and not replace it with something. The belief

typically represents a need that is filled, if only temporarily. YTour methods range from ridicule to debate, which are tools of rational and scientific expression but you lack content, You don’t advocate or extrapolate on, for instance, randomness as an explanation of exsistence. You ridicule and attempt to discredit the tenants of, primaraly, christian thought. Haredawg signed out

SilverScorp83

Ugh… I’m going to say this because I feel I need to at this point. Your math student analogy is very bad. To conclude that the student was wrong, you used a simple proof. The product of two numbers greater than 1 is greater than either of the two numbers, therefore the proposed equality is false. Mathematics is a special beast with positive and negative proofs like this. It can’t be…

…compared to religion in the way you attempted. What you really did was convert the original problem into a mathematical test and found the answer to that problem. You can do that with math. Not with religion.

“To conclude that the student was wrong, you used a simple proof.” I was just as concerned with HOW the person came up with their answer as I was with the answer itself. If a 5 year old counts the number of blocks by counting, 1, 4, 7, 2, 8, 6 – and says that there are 6 blocks (and there are), there is still something WRONG about the way the child got the answer, and that is important!

Hmmm so what makes you think that since you know the order we use for counting, you also know what causes a method of reaching a conclusion about religion to be wrong? The scientific method cannot be applied in this case. It only applies when you’re studying an empirical subject. Faith and religion certainly isn’t empirical. So what method is the correct one then?