RE: Could E.T. have influenced religion?
April 18, 2011 at 11:21 am
(This post was last modified: April 18, 2011 at 11:26 am by orogenicman.)
(April 18, 2011 at 11:03 am)Napoleon666 Wrote: @orogenicman i thank you for your information, i didnt mean to say you wasn't giving any constructive info just the manner in which you were providing it seemed to make me feel as though i was a bumbling nincompoop who didnt know anything about the subject. which i most probably am, but still it's not nice realising that when someone who knows what they're talking about puts you to shame
as i said before i do agree and understand your points. the mountain in question is almost certainly a geological phenomena which you have suggested, not created by humans or E.T.
i guess my problem is indeed that i try and find reasons for things without properly assessing them. would you believe i actually have an AS level qualification in critical thinking? i know right! the problem is i spent more time dealing with political arguments and arguments which dealt with opinions than those which operate in the realm of knowledge and fact. this is probably where i am going wrong.
thanks for the posts anyways, sorry if i come across as a n00b
I can entirely understand where you are coming from. But you have to keep in mind that at the age of 18, most people alive are older and more experienced than you, and so you should probably take a minute to think about your responses before posting them. It helps. Please keep in mind that I'm not trying to be condescending with this response.
Science is like politics in that you have to argue your position to get people to come around to your point of view. Unlike politics, science is the search for the true nature of things. And so scientific theories are not in any way like what lay people normally think of as a theory. One of the most common logical fallacies that the average person makes is by trying to use anecdotes to prove their claims. This is most common in religious circles but is also rampant in pseudoscience circles. From ther link I provided earlier:
Quote:4) Anecdotes do not make a science. Anecdotes - stories recounted in support of a claim - do not make a science. Without corroborative evidence from other sources, or physical proof of some sort, ten anecdotes are no better than one, and a hundred anecdotes are no better than ten. Anecdotes are told by fallible human storytellers. Farmer Bob in Puckerbrush, Kansas, may be an honest, church-going, family man not obviously subject to delusions, but we need physical evidence of an alien spacecraft or alien bodies, not just a story about landings and abductions at 3:00 A.M. on a deserted country road. Likewise with many medical claims. Stories about how your Aunt Mary's cancer was cured by watching Marx brothers movies or taking liver extract from castrated chickens are meaningless. The cancer might have gone into remission on its own, which some cancers do; or it might have been misdiagnosed; or, or, or.... What we need are controlled experiments, not anecdotes. We need 100 subjects with cancer, all properly diagnosed and matched. Then we need 25 of the subjects to watch Marx brothers movies, 25 to watch Alfred Hitchcock movies, 25 to watch the news, and 25 to watch nothing. Then we need to deduct the average rate or remission for this type of cancer and then analyze the data for statistically significant differences between the groups. If there are statistically significant differences, we better get confirmation from other scientists who have conducted their own experiments separate from ours before we hold a press conference to announce the cure for cancer.
This is why I recommended that you search for people who actually have studied/mapped that area in detail in the field. I haven't studied it, so I can only tell you what I know about similar areas and how natural processes can produce such a feature. But keep in mind that what I know isn't merely anecdotal. It is based on what I know from 9 years of college and 20 years in the field. And while that might sound like I am arguing from authority, keep in mind that I have also pointed out my own limitations with regard to knowledge of the region. I am much more familiar with the broader Andes area as it relates to plate tectonics than I am about individual areas there.
'The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and seal. It could not be expressed better.'
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
- Dr. Donald Prothero
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
- Dr. Donald Prothero
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