That’s the true shame of fundamentalism: the worship of blindness.

And Intelligent Design is a theory that evolution did happen, but it all happened one week in 4004BC and (depending on your school district) then stopped.   It’s usually taught in ways that fail to teach the scientific method or explore scientific techniques in fields such as geology and biology, and if anybody does use ID as a hypothesis that can be considered the way you consider other scientific hypotheses, anti-evolutionists tend to really freak out and sue people.

/former Capo Valley band, choir, drama, art geek

I have yet to hear any evidence at all for the existence of any divine being, apart from someone pointing to a book and saying ‘it says so in here, and I believe it’.

Even if it turns out to be someday “easy” to make thinking machines, the most important questions remains how to make them *friendly.* How do you design a *goal system* for such a machine that makes it choose to do what you want, *even after it begins upgrading itself.* Because an intelligent machine will try to upgrade itself, including upgrading it’s own goal system. This is like me trying to improve my moral reasoning skills as a way of strengthening my current preference for not murdering people. How do I ensure the resulting reasoning system will be better than what I have now, as evaluated by my current system?

If you get it wrong, you very quickly end up with a Paperclip Maximizer or a grey goo scenario, or maybe machines harvesting your body in order to tile the galaxy with images of smiling faces.

Of course, the same populace believes in psychics, alien abductions, ghosts, and many other absurd things.

Essentially if you want to be a pompous dickhead then by all means, but if you intend to teach; do so with gentility. 

I’d take a good force choke over the above. At least I could lightsaber the bastard…

Seriously you guys, look into the influence of Greek philosophy on Christianity. Do you care about understanding this nutty pot pourri? Even if you don’t believe, it’s fricking fascinating. I use the word “fricking” advisedly.

(Is that like way too 2007? My apologies.)

Aristotle lived 4 centuries before Christ. The Christians were exposed to his works one thousand years after Christ, adopted th eparts they found usefl, and discarded the rest. “Direct” it most certainly isn’t.

Since Roman Catholicism is just the Roman State Cult repackaged, I’d say that they were aware of pre-Christian philosophy from the beginning. That and the fact that most of the founders of the pre-schism church were from the Greek world.

An interesting idea. If we had the technology to change the laws of physics, it seems we’d very quickly be approaching god status ourselves.