Pika Chu, I'll debate you. I'll play the role of the creationist.
I'm Starting To Understand Atheist and Evolution
by Philadelphia Ponos 106 Replies latest watchtower bible
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whereami
Jaguarbass why do hate scienctists so much?
Because they make baby jesus cry.
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Pika_Chu
@Nomad Soul: Pika Chu, I'll debate you. I'll play the role of the creationist.
Well, that would be fun. Do you seriously want to do it?
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Nathan Natas
NomadSoul,
If I have 100 marbles, it is also true that I have dozens of marbles.
If there are trillions of stars, then there are billions and billions of stars.
Thanks for the correction. From it, I learned something about you.
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NomadSoul
Pikachu that thread was not the one I intended we could make one more seriously.
Oh Nathan Nathan, I corrected you because of this discovery made a few months ago : Geeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh. I'm going to slap the crap out of you.
Not the best article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/02/science/space/02star.html
How Many Stars? Three Times as Many as We Thought, Report Says
By KENNETH CHANG
Published: December 1, 2010
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It really is full of stars.
NASA, via Associated Press
A photo taken in 2006 by the Hubble Space Telescope shows a cluster of diverse galaxies, including a bright elliptical galaxy.
Related
Senators Push NASA to Carry Out Revamping (December 2, 2010)
Scientists said Wednesday that the number of stars in the universe had been seriously undercounted, and they estimated that there could be three times as many stars out there as had been thought.
This undercounting, of cool, dim dwarf stars in certain galaxies, could throw a monkey wrench into astronomers’ understanding of how galaxies formed and grew over the eons.
“It’s very problematic,” said Pieter van Dokkum, a professor of astronomy at Yale who reported the findings in the journal Nature with Charlie Conroy of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.
The conundrum is that astronomers cannot actually count the dwarf stars, which have masses less than a third of that of the Sun, in galaxies outside the Milky Way. So instead, they counted the brighter Sun-like stars and assumed that there were about 100 unseen dwarfs for each larger Sun-like star, as is the case in the Milky Way.
Yet not every galaxy looks like the Milky Way, with its spiraling pinwheel arms. Some are blobby and elliptical, and it was an untested assumption that the distribution of star sizes in elliptical galaxies is the same as in the Milky Way.
Dr. van Dokkum and Dr. Conroy took an innovative approach to counting what they could not see. Because the dwarfs are cooler, the fingerprint of certain colors they emit and absorb is different from that of larger stars. Thus, while they could not see individual stars, the astronomers could calculate the number of dwarfs required to produce the telltale color fingerprint they detected in the light coming from the whole galaxy.
And they found that in eight elliptical galaxies, the ratio of dwarf stars to Sun-like stars was 1,000 or 2,000 to 1, rather than the 100 to 1 in the Milky Way. A typical elliptical galaxy, thought to consist of about 100 billion stars, would have one trillion or more stars. Ellipticals account for about a third of all galaxies, leading to the new estimate of at least three times as many stars over all.
“We may have to abandon this notion of using the Milky Way as a template for the rest of the universe,” Dr. van Dokkum said. If the findings are correct, an undercount of dwarfs would mean astronomers have underestimated the masses of galaxies, and that would mean that galaxies developed earlier and faster than currently thought.
“Which would be very interesting, actually,” said Richard Ellis, a professor of astronomy at the California Institute of Technology who was not involved in the research. “It’s very important that papers like this are published so that we are reminded how fragile our knowledge of the universe is.”
Yet Dr. Ellis said he remained skeptical. “It’s good data and it’s a sound analysis,” he said, “but there are a few escape clauses.”
For one, the research assumes that the stars in an elliptical galaxy are made of exactly the same stuff as those in spiral galaxies, an assumption that cannot be tested yet.
Also inconclusive: whether we now have three times as many wishes.
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wyorobert
Once you are on the logical side of the argument it is difficult to see it any other way. I can't understand how people can argue against Science and then just make a blanket statement " so there must be a God ". All I hear when someone says that is "so it must be from magical powers". Even if someone convinced me that DNA evidence is crap and Evolution or adaptation is garbage, I still wouldn't just make the leap to concluding that there must be a God.
Our inablity to comprehend something doesn't prove the existence of God. Why is there never a real discussion by believers of where on earth this magical God came from. Ultimately the first God had to be created by chance.
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Satanus
whereami
Hehe. The guy has incredible focus.
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I don't see intelligence behind the 'creation'. I see a bumbling oaf wondering down many dead ends. Once in a while, a nondeadend is encountered and 'growth' takes place.
Scientists now believe that, during the first few minutes after the big bang, there was a lot of matter and antimatter. Thses two species of matter promptly annihalated each other, releasing pure energy. The only thing is, there was slightly more matter than antimatter, hence an itsy bitsy part of the original matters survived. That was a close call, and not a very smart move.
As well, around 99% of all the species that ever existed went extinct. Not too intelligent.
The bible says that humans came from dirt. Scientists say humans came from the same ancestor that monkeys came from. Around 98% of our dna is the same as that of chimps. So, based on the evidence, what are humans most closely related to, dirt, or chimps?
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OnTheWayOut
Many believers who say that Atheists or others that promote the evolution theory had bad experiences with religion are really believers that don't want to face their own doubts and turn up their own cognitive dissonance. They often feel the need to express things about unbelievers in their own terms. So they say it takes faith to be an atheist. They say atheists ignore the evidence. They say many things that actually apply to believers.
But let us assume that a majority of atheists have had a bad experience with religion.
RELIGION IS, AFTERALL, A BAD EXPERIENCE.
Certainly, the atheists here on JWN have had a bad experience with religion. That's why we are here. But outside of JWN, it might also be true that it took a bad experience to get someone to look past the peer/family pressure to remain within a belief system. We are only a short number of years away from the point where people still belonged to the church and evolution wasn't taught in the schools. I would imagine that another generation from now, the vast majority of people in the U.S., Europe, many other places, will not have had much experience with religion and then things will be different. But that's the future.
In reality, these past bad experiences don't mean much. The typical atheist is not just deciding that God doesn't exist. Oh, there's plenty of people that just decide to ignore religion, but they don't just destroy God without some research or at least some serious thought on how their belief system totally doesn't make sense and is mythology.
