RE: Where did the universe come from? Atheistic origin science has no answer.
June 19, 2015 at 8:08 am
Yes, but faith is informed in some way in most circumstances.
- If you step outside in the morning and you see cloudy skies and a stiff breeze blowing, you might grab an umbrella. Not because it's raining, but signs point to the possibility.
- If your friend agrees to a particular appointment, your level of certainty that he will show up (faith) depends on his reliability.
- If someone wrote god's thoughts in a book thousands of years ago, your level of certainty that they are true depends on what you were told to believe about it by someone else, who was similarly convinced to accept a book for which there otherwise isn't enough evidence to differentiate it from the other ancient books that other people believe were written by god, but which you are convinced are false.
Hopefully you can see the difference in those three examples.
- If you step outside in the morning and you see cloudy skies and a stiff breeze blowing, you might grab an umbrella. Not because it's raining, but signs point to the possibility.
- If your friend agrees to a particular appointment, your level of certainty that he will show up (faith) depends on his reliability.
- If someone wrote god's thoughts in a book thousands of years ago, your level of certainty that they are true depends on what you were told to believe about it by someone else, who was similarly convinced to accept a book for which there otherwise isn't enough evidence to differentiate it from the other ancient books that other people believe were written by god, but which you are convinced are false.
Hopefully you can see the difference in those three examples.
"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
