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re: The Harriet Tubman legend is literally a myth invented by 2 Communist writers
Posted on 2/8/26 at 7:39 am to scottydoesntknow
Posted on 2/8/26 at 7:39 am to scottydoesntknow
quote:
Yep there was a freed black man who became an engineer and designed some cool bridges in Alabama back in the late 1800s...but his story isnt cool enough because he wasnt stickin it to white people, he was helping them build towns and making a name for himself based off merit and talent
Gotta be talking about Johnny Reynolds.
IYKYNThis post was edited on 2/8/26 at 7:50 am
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Posted on 2/8/26 at 7:48 am to wackatimesthree
Let's slow down and make sure we distinguish claims about methodological limits from metaphysical claims (this discussion keeps derailing by collapsing methodological rules into metaphysical commitments).
My interpretation of your Lewontin quote is a description of a boundary condition of scientific method, not a secret confession about what reality ultimately is. Science brackets supernatural explanations not because they’re “known to be false” but because they aren’t operationally testable. That’s a rule of the science game, not a claim about God.
This is where abductive reasoning is getting misapplied. An inference to the “best explanation” only works within a set of shared constraints. Intelligent design can feel explanatorily satisfying at a metaphysical level, but it doesn’t generate testable mechanisms, predictions, or a research program that can be refined when it fails. That’s why it doesn’t function as a scientific explanation, regardless of whether it’s true or false in some ultimate sense. Hence the boundary work.
None of this requires pretending current origin-of-life models are good, complete, or even close. Many aren’t. Saying “material explanations are incomplete” doesn't imply “therefore design is the scientific alternative”.
From a citizen-epistemics standpoint (dudes jawing on the internets), the key distinction is this - science is a tool for narrowing possibilities under constraints, not a tribunal for settling metaphysics. Confusing those roles is what makes pedagogical simplifications feel like ideological enforcement.
If the claim is that textbooks should be clearer about uncertainty and open problems then I agree with you. If the claim is that science secretly knows one thing and teaches another, that’s a much stronger claim, and it needs evidence at the institutional level, not just dissatisfaction with current theories. And by the way, I'm not even saying Lewontin isn't a godless atheistic materialist. For all I know, he may be (there are many such people). But you need not be to reject ID from biology.
My interpretation of your Lewontin quote is a description of a boundary condition of scientific method, not a secret confession about what reality ultimately is. Science brackets supernatural explanations not because they’re “known to be false” but because they aren’t operationally testable. That’s a rule of the science game, not a claim about God.
This is where abductive reasoning is getting misapplied. An inference to the “best explanation” only works within a set of shared constraints. Intelligent design can feel explanatorily satisfying at a metaphysical level, but it doesn’t generate testable mechanisms, predictions, or a research program that can be refined when it fails. That’s why it doesn’t function as a scientific explanation, regardless of whether it’s true or false in some ultimate sense. Hence the boundary work.
None of this requires pretending current origin-of-life models are good, complete, or even close. Many aren’t. Saying “material explanations are incomplete” doesn't imply “therefore design is the scientific alternative”.
From a citizen-epistemics standpoint (dudes jawing on the internets), the key distinction is this - science is a tool for narrowing possibilities under constraints, not a tribunal for settling metaphysics. Confusing those roles is what makes pedagogical simplifications feel like ideological enforcement.
If the claim is that textbooks should be clearer about uncertainty and open problems then I agree with you. If the claim is that science secretly knows one thing and teaches another, that’s a much stronger claim, and it needs evidence at the institutional level, not just dissatisfaction with current theories. And by the way, I'm not even saying Lewontin isn't a godless atheistic materialist. For all I know, he may be (there are many such people). But you need not be to reject ID from biology.
This post was edited on 2/8/26 at 8:03 am
Posted on 2/8/26 at 8:02 am to SirWinston
The nose knows.
Posted on 2/8/26 at 9:37 am to Ag Zwin
Where in the constitution does the president have agency to wage war on his own people to force them to stay in the union?
Posted on 2/8/26 at 9:42 am to Ailsa
Surprised this thread wasn't whacked once the people who can't be criticized were brought up.
Posted on 2/8/26 at 9:43 am to Tantal
Black people are criticized around the clock here.
Posted on 2/8/26 at 9:45 am to TenWheelsForJesus
quote:
The majority of people recognized during gay and black months are activists. They want the youth to think that the only way to success and recognition is through activism. If blacks, especially, realize they can become successful by being business owners, professionals, scientists or just decent hardworking people, then the democrats lose their power over them.
This.
It’s the reason why AG Gaston is not a household name.
This post was edited on 2/8/26 at 9:46 am
Posted on 2/8/26 at 9:47 am to 4cubbies
quote:
Black people are criticized around the clock here.
He wasn't talking about black people, I don't believe.
Posted on 2/8/26 at 9:48 am to TigerDoc
quote:
but it doesn’t generate testable mechanisms, predictions
Agreed, science is about understanding natural events, not supernatural events.
Its a bad example, but geology tells us very little about how a stretch of road was formed.
Posted on 2/8/26 at 9:49 am to 4cubbies
quote:
Black people are criticized around the clock here.
Actually, the point of the thread wasn't "black people". The point was a Marxist journalist making up a story and using a black woman as a pawn.
Posted on 2/8/26 at 10:01 am to Tantal
We see how the left creates heroes with George Floyd, Mike brown, Renee good etc
Posted on 2/8/26 at 10:04 am to Narax
That’s actually a good way of putting it. Science is a tool for understanding natural processes, not for adjudicating all possible causes.
The key is not that science denies other kinds of explanation. It’s that it deliberately limits itself to explanations that can be checked, refined, and argued over by people who don’t share the same metaphysical assumptions.
IMO, that restraint is a feature, not a dodge. It’s what lets people with very different ultimate beliefs still build reliable knowledge together. It allowed Francis Collins, an evangelical, to lead a team of people with a wide variety of metaphysical beliefs to do work together on a common project (they sequenced the entire human genome). It's the constraints that serve collaborative coordination.
Problems arise when we mistake those limits for hidden commitments or when we expect a tool designed for one kind of question to answer a different kind entirely. That’s where a lot of these debates get tangled - not really over evidence, but over which questions a given method is actually built to handle.
The key is not that science denies other kinds of explanation. It’s that it deliberately limits itself to explanations that can be checked, refined, and argued over by people who don’t share the same metaphysical assumptions.
IMO, that restraint is a feature, not a dodge. It’s what lets people with very different ultimate beliefs still build reliable knowledge together. It allowed Francis Collins, an evangelical, to lead a team of people with a wide variety of metaphysical beliefs to do work together on a common project (they sequenced the entire human genome). It's the constraints that serve collaborative coordination.
Problems arise when we mistake those limits for hidden commitments or when we expect a tool designed for one kind of question to answer a different kind entirely. That’s where a lot of these debates get tangled - not really over evidence, but over which questions a given method is actually built to handle.
This post was edited on 2/8/26 at 10:06 am
Posted on 2/8/26 at 10:16 am to TigerDoc
If science as proclaimed in officialdom were as you describe, then we could invoke difficult to dismiss works by people such as Fomenko and Cremo to mention just two. For example, the fossil record is as much an article of faith as any religious dogma but it is accepted as “settled” science despite massive problems with its underlying “data”.
Metaphysics may be used to explain much of what we see that is typically ignored or denied such as near death experiences and the psychic phenomenology of organ transplantation. Science cannot define in coherent ways its most fundamental characteristics such as gravity, charge or matter. To me this is explicit proof of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. We cannot prove this system appealing only to things within it.
Metaphysics may be used to explain much of what we see that is typically ignored or denied such as near death experiences and the psychic phenomenology of organ transplantation. Science cannot define in coherent ways its most fundamental characteristics such as gravity, charge or matter. To me this is explicit proof of Gödel’s incompleteness theorem. We cannot prove this system appealing only to things within it.
Posted on 2/8/26 at 10:18 am to TigerDoc
quote:
It’s what lets people with very different ultimate beliefs still build reliable knowledge together. It allowed Francis Collins, an evangelical, to lead a team of people with a wide variety of metaphysical beliefs to do work together on a common project (they sequenced the entire human genome). It's the constraints that serve collaborative coordination.
Fully agreed.
Posted on 2/8/26 at 10:21 am to Tantal
4cubbies isn't near as bright as she thinks she is.
Posted on 2/8/26 at 10:25 am to White Tiger
Provoking some good posts here. 
I agree with the spirit of what you’re pointing at, though I’d draw the lines a bit differently.
Science really is incomplete. It doesn’t give ultimate explanations of gravity, matter, or consciousness. It gives models that work within defined domains. IMO, that’s not a failure so much as the price of having a system that different people can use together without agreeing on metaphysics.
Where I’d gently push back is on equating that incompleteness with “article of faith”. The fossil record, for example, isn’t treated as settled because it’s perfect, but because it’s constrained by multiple independent lines of evidence that converge: stratigraphy, radiometric dating, comparative anatomy, genetics. Each is corrigible, but together they’re hard to dismiss wholesale.
For near-death experiences or other anomalous stuff, I don't think science isn’t denying them so much as struggling to operationalize them. Some questions sit at the edge of what current methods can handle, and history suggests that edge keeps moving (but unevenly).
Godel is relevant here, but in a narrower way than people often mean. Incompleteness as I understand it tells us that no formal system can prove all truths about itself. It doesn’t tell us that all systems are therefore equally good. It tells us we need multiple, limited tools, each with clearly marked boundaries.
The danger isn’t acknowledging limits, but in losing the distinction between a system being incomplete and a system being arbitrary. Science is incomplete by design, but it’s not unconstrained.
So wonder belongs here and so does humility. The trick is keeping both without dissolving the standards that let us reason together at all.
I agree with the spirit of what you’re pointing at, though I’d draw the lines a bit differently.
Science really is incomplete. It doesn’t give ultimate explanations of gravity, matter, or consciousness. It gives models that work within defined domains. IMO, that’s not a failure so much as the price of having a system that different people can use together without agreeing on metaphysics.
Where I’d gently push back is on equating that incompleteness with “article of faith”. The fossil record, for example, isn’t treated as settled because it’s perfect, but because it’s constrained by multiple independent lines of evidence that converge: stratigraphy, radiometric dating, comparative anatomy, genetics. Each is corrigible, but together they’re hard to dismiss wholesale.
For near-death experiences or other anomalous stuff, I don't think science isn’t denying them so much as struggling to operationalize them. Some questions sit at the edge of what current methods can handle, and history suggests that edge keeps moving (but unevenly).
Godel is relevant here, but in a narrower way than people often mean. Incompleteness as I understand it tells us that no formal system can prove all truths about itself. It doesn’t tell us that all systems are therefore equally good. It tells us we need multiple, limited tools, each with clearly marked boundaries.
The danger isn’t acknowledging limits, but in losing the distinction between a system being incomplete and a system being arbitrary. Science is incomplete by design, but it’s not unconstrained.
So wonder belongs here and so does humility. The trick is keeping both without dissolving the standards that let us reason together at all.
This post was edited on 2/8/26 at 10:34 am
Posted on 2/8/26 at 10:27 am to wackatimesthree
quote:
And it's not just Hoyle. That was just one example, one quote, to show how insane it is for people like the two of you to defend the common narrative that science KNOWS can't be true, but won't officially debunk for the public
Before you keep typing, can you give me a brief overview of where we stand now in terms of how life came to being? Don't use AI and give me links.
Posted on 2/8/26 at 10:32 am to TigerDoc
Well, I must point out that you are misguided about the fossil record as I thought would be the case. Evolutionary biology based on it has ignored many hard artifacts that contradict current dogma. It is based also on a tiny fraction of exploration of the earth’s surface. Much of this evidence was clearly described in the 19th century but has been, well, ignored. Anyone who subscribes to scientific officialdom as it exists today has neglected to see its glaring inconsistencies and not done any rigorous research outside the Overton Window of claptrap. Cheers.
Posted on 2/8/26 at 10:34 am to White Tiger
quote:
Well, I must point out that you are misguided about the fossil record as I thought would be the case. Evolutionary biology based on it has ignored many hard artifacts that contradict current dogma
Talk about being misguided.
Posted on 2/8/26 at 11:01 am to White Tiger
Happy to discuss the fossil record if you'd like and we can get into the genetics, stratigraphy, radiometrics, comparative anatomy too so you can see what I mean.
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