(March 15, 2014 at 10:08 am)whateverist Wrote:That's why I was careful to qualify my post (bolded part) although I should have replaced "seems" with "seemed." I think that for the recently-deconverted there is the misconception that "agnostic" refers to someone who has doubts, while "atheist" refers to someone who is certain. I think that there is a difference between saying "I'm not sure if there is a god" and "I do not know if there is a god." I think that those are two different situations, in that most of the time the things we have doubts about (did I leave my keys in my coat pocket, or in the kitchen?) are very different from the things we admit we don't know (is there life beneath the icy surface of Enceladus?).(March 14, 2014 at 8:24 pm)Tonus Wrote: I took the label at the very beginning when I decided to abandon religion, but to me the term seems to indicate that I was seeking answers.Looks like a point on which we can very reasonably disagree.
"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
