(December 20, 2016 at 5:51 pm)RiddledWithFear Wrote: Question here, and I know it's a stupid question, but bear with me. When you analogize a god or a number of gods to the tooth fairy, etc. are you saying they are equally improbable? In that sense, are you saying straight-out they don't exist, or just that they are highly improbable of existing?
They can be compared. A child will believe in the Tooth Fairy or Santa Claus because they are told this --by authority figures they trust-- in such a way as to be convinced. They are also convinced by a simple experiment where a tooth is placed under their pillow and is replaced by a coin. The parents insist that they had no part in the exchange, and the child is bewildered that it could be done literally under his nose! He now has physical evidence for the belief and no reason to suspect that he is being lied to and misled. If he is suspicious and makes inquiries, the parents can weave all kinds of tales to explain any discrepancies because the creature in question is magical and this makes all kinds of explanations seem plausible.
Apply that approach to religion and imagine that, in the example above, the parents never tell their children the truth about the Tooth Fairy and they and their peers grow up convinced that it's true, complete with increasingly dissonant explanations for why they or their children do not get their teeth exchanged for coins anymore.
"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
