(April 10, 2013 at 7:10 pm)ManMachine Wrote: So convinced of the absolute inviolability of modern science, the neo-atheist behaves like a fundamentalist in their defence of their belief. Offering up misinterpretations and meaningless quotes stripped of context to maintain purchase on their belief, attacking reasoned enquiry like cyber-crusaders lopping off the heads of anyone who dare violate the first commandment of neo-atheism – Science is a jealous god and thou shalt not have any other god before it.
I think this is just the realization that a person's belief system doesn't change them as much as we like to think it does. We are who we are, and as much as we like to define others in simple terms (while reveling in our own depth of personality), people are a mixture of conscious and sub-conscious beliefs and behaviors that we don't understand anywhere near as much as we'd like to think we do. A person who becomes an atheist is still, on many levels, the person he was when he was a theist, and vice-versa.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
