Granting for the sake of discussion that US colleges and universities are IQ sorting machines with a priveleged near-monopoly position for providing that service, and the content of the educ—–, ahem, seat time matters little to employers, then why don’t we see employers hiring young people with no more than an acceptance letter in hand?

In fact, you can’t prove scientifically that God does or does not exist. Both positions are matters of faith.

See the word “scientifically” in the last paragraph. As it happens science is a branch of philosophy. Which is by definition man centered –as in Man is the measure of all things

God is by definition God centered. If Man could measure God then God would not be God.

When God is the measure of all things then you are talking theology. When man is the measure of all things then you are talking philosophy.

A great confusion came into the english speaking world by way of bacon & decartes in the early 1600′s when they created a tree of knowledge and put theology as a subbranch of philosophy.

That has caused considerable confusion ever since.

-Actually, for any thinking atheist it should be a problem too. The fact that humanity is characterized by our shared uses of transcendent signs that have no material existence – words exist, in the material domain, only as letters or as sounds that the brain can associate in apprehending the transcendent sign – should throw into doubt any strictly materialist philosophy. One can bracket the question of whether God exists; but a serious student of the human sciences cannot argue away, as something unnecessary, the fact that humans are religious beings. Atheism is a form of religion too.

Best wishes, W, in the years ahead

http://www.robertlstephens.com/essays/shafarevich/001SocialistPhenomenon.html#pagestart_194

Hard science is the process of determining the behavior of the material universe through observation, controlled testing, and the application of human reason. The hard sciences, such as mathematics, chemistry, physics, engineering, astronomy and biology, have as their subjects the organic and inorganic elements of nature – including the observable and testable functions of life it’s self. It is difficult to fudge hard science because the untruth of fudged hard science can be demonstrated by repetition of the original observation and testing, and proven false.

The soft sciences of psychology, sociology, political “science”, women’s studies, cross-cultural studies, etc., etc., etc. differ from the hard sciences in that the subject is the human being. The human being can only be studied in the same way as the objects of hard science if the human being is only a material object, say like a lab mouse, or a tree, or a mineral. For the Atheist and Marxist this is not a problem, but for the religious it is – since man is understood to have a supernatural component. For the religious it is understood that man is made in the image of God, and that man therefore has an eternal soul. Since the soul of man can’t be directly observed or tested as in the hard sciences, there can be no hard science in the study of the complete man – man the animal, but whose soul is made in the image of God. Soft science will always be soft and incomplete if man has a soul; and the teachers and practitioners of soft science will come to incomplete or erroneous conclusions when man is viewed as simply a thing or object for observation.

Igor Shafarevich, a brilliant Russian mathematician, came to this conclusion in his book The Socialist Phenomenon. Here is an excerpt regarding the soft “scientific” Socialist/Marxist understanding of man:

“Individuals correspond to the elemental particles of matter, which must be identical… As for Marxism, one thinks of an analogy with another physical theory. This is the kinetic theory of gases, according to which a gas is the aggregate of molecules that come into collision, with the result of each collision determined by the laws of mechanics. A very great number of molecules
transform the statistical laws of their collision into the general laws of the physics of gases. The only form of social contact of the producers of goods in capitalist society is exchange (just as for gas molecules the only form of interaction is collision). The interaction of a great number of producers engenders that “social production” which, in its turn, determines their political, legal and religious notions, and the “social, political and spiritual processes of life in general.”

This is the end result of soft science: Marxist Socialism.

In the current age the practice has been reconstituted. It is one of the chief Obama’s chief selling points.

Vote for me and get your ancestors out of hock.

Luther contended that the sale of indulgences promoted witchcraft. I tend to agree.

then as now Christians have a better eschatology to deal with it than everyone else.

Which is why some folks go so far out of their ways to discredit it.

the other thing happening now but less publicized is that the slow fall of water desalination and transport is accelerating. I blog on the latest here
http://nick2.wordpress.com/
this also bodes well for desert countries.
basically starting in 10-15 years I think the press of populations will reverse course because of technological change.