Ringer

Did you not say, "by any standard"? If you want to measure accomplishments I would say E. coli have us beat. They've been everywhere we have, but have another species do all the work for them. Also, if our bacteria die we die, if we die our bacteria just move.

Were the volcanoes unnatural at the end of the Permian? They certainly fill the criteria the same as our technology does.

Probably because there wasn't death before the original sin according to many.

A long standing philosophical belief in dualism.

Do you have the numbers for this? If you make a factual statement like that you have to back it up with evidence. Maybe they're just the loudest in 1st world countries. Yeah, people can explain those much better than just going, 'magic'. Most people are fine without the ignorance, so why would you think that you couldn't be happy without being ignorant? Except where it tells you to persecute others.

Here is a way to understand this using order/disorder from one of your examples. When you looked at the stones they were very smooth and nice looking right? So what caused that? To smooth out the stone pieces of the stone had to be broken off, this increases the amount of material scattered around (i.e. more disordered). So even though that stone looks more ordered because our minds like smooth things, the system has more useless pieces so it's less ordered than it was before.

The principle of least effort applies to linguistics pretty well. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_least_effort

So you suspect there is something different about basalt therefore cleverness? You're not even making an argument, you're just repeating that you think there is some mysterious drive toward an ordered system.

So if I have 20 d20 (20 sided dice) and I roll them until the result is 20,19,18,17,. . . I can then assume the dice are clever because that arrangement is more ordered? Or an explanation that doesn't need a huge assumption could be that with enough energy input (me rolling multiple times) a statistically unlikely event (an ordered system) can occur solely due to the amount of tries. That doesn't need cleverness in any way to explain it.

How can you define clever by saying something is innate. If it is innate it just does its thing, no thought or 'cleverness' about it. So your definition is basically "something does something natural".

There is as little connection between the claims made on the show and the debate of life in other places as the connection between star wars being real and there being life in other places.

The instructor may have also been talking about which factor is causing the movement of the current, meaning whether the movement of ions is being caused by an electrical gradient or a chemical gradient.

It's probably just showing a normal two chromosomes to compare that the sex chromosomes are abnormal. Without context, though, that's solely a guess.

Obviously the demolition was done using gravity manipulation

You seem to be mistaken, the ideas posed in the show have no merit in the scientific (or historical) sense. There is no evidence to support the ideas and the entire premise is based on an argument from incredulity. It's not clutching at straws, it's creating straws to clutch. I can just as easily claim that people used to be able to fly because the Nazca lines can be seen from above, there are all sorts of drawings of people flying/with wings, there are writings of people flying/with wings, etc. Are these points worth a consideration?

Looking at the graph it seems that right when stage 2 occurs there is a drop in velocity. This would be consistent with the idea that the top structure met some sort of resistance (supporting beams and such) and broke through until it met other set of structural supports. It should also be noted that we are only looking at the north face of the building. It is possible that internally or another side of the building was falling before the North face, causing the North face to fall faster due to the structural support being damaged before that side met it. This is supported when looking at the picture and seeing the structure jutting from the top of the building falling before the north face falls.

IIRC, PZ Myers does hold the position that scientific thought = atheism. But I don't know if that would necessarily equate to evolution = atheism.

It should be noted that my comment was before the comment before it was edited, it was only the first schematic and the comment above it. Yes, I know what free-fall is and that is why I asked if the schematic was your argument, it's a known concept and it didn't add anything to the discussion. I haven't read the analysis and final report in any sort of detail so I can't comment on what happened to the building. But what I have seen and read (about 9/11 conspiracies as a whole) there doesn't seem to be any credible evidence to support the controlled demolition angle.

I apparently didn't read the comment as well as I should have, probably because I was tired and had my 'just a hunch' visors on. In all honest I can't even remember what I thought about the comment because when I reread it the explanation it's not really objectionable. Perhaps I was against speculative answers in the main sub-forum, but due to my apparent need for a one-liner we'll never know. Apologies to you, it seems my reading comprehension was on vacation. When I see 'just a hunch' I immediately assume a pseudo-sciencey, pseudo-philosophical rambling follows which may have made me immediately biased toward your comment.

Is that schematic your argument? Also, I don't think using the imperial system for physics problems is reasonable by any stretch of the imagination. . .

Did you not see the argument that starting from a false premise usually leads to false conclusions? It's pretty effective and, as an added bonus, it's true!

I feel I'm a bit confused. Are we talking about ridiculing people holding ideas, or the ideas themselves? Sometimes it seems someone is talking about one and someone else is talking about the other. Also, is honestly saying what a belief entails ridiculing? Because that is what most of the animosity towards Creationism I witness (biases acknowledged) is

So you're going to go ahead and not go with evidence and go with a hunch?

I don't think Dawkins and Krauss are as anti-religious as most would have one believe. What I have heard and read from them tends to be more of ridiculing the belief of things that are long falsified and patently ridiculous. Not to say that there are not many scientists who mock religion thoroughly, but there are many non-scientists who do the same. It's a given that many scientists go straight toward an argument style that seems like animosity when arguing with Creationists, but it would do the same thing when arguing with someone about homeopathy if they believed homeopathy works (or acupuncture, heliocentric universe, etc.). It seems that way because most people can't separate an attack on an idea and an attack on themselves. When I say that homeopathy is ridiculous someone may automatically assume I am calling them stupid because they believe something that is ridiculous. It's not true that I am saying the person is stupid (belief of these things can come from a wide variety of factors), but the tone will be taken as hostile. As for the atheism driving communication of science, I'm not sure I understand what you mean. If you mean they never talk about supernatural things then that's just what science is, methodological naturalism. If you mean they talk about god in any sense, then they're not talking about science. They may be talking about probability or specific claims made by religion that can be falsified, but that's still not communicating science.

I'm curious since I grew up with Creationism as well, what was it that made you realize the arguments against evolution were weak? I think something like that may help with Moontanman's question about how to deal with those discussions and add a better alternative than the two I gave .