(December 29, 2015 at 10:06 am)Fake Messiah Wrote:This has nothing to say in response to my post.(December 15, 2015 at 4:16 pm)Delicate Wrote: . Just like a toddler might say "I see no evidence of the validity of Quantum Mechanics" or a blind woman might say "I see no evidence of the existence of colors" the problem might be with the person and not the evidence.
Wow you really got us! I pull my hat down! It's true all of it! This means Mohammed really rode on a flying horse and Jesus was born of virgin. NOT!!!
The truth is children need to be armed with knowledge to face this world. Much more knowledge then we had in their age. It is scary but alternative is worse.
I would tell toddler evidence is all around you without quantum mechanics there would be no transistor, and hence no personal computer; no laser, and hence no Blu-ray players.
I see, Delicate, you don't understand what reality is. Reality is everything that exists. Our five senses – sight, smell, touch, hearing and taste – do a pretty good job of convincing us that many things are real: rocks and camels, butterflies, ice creams, marbles... When it comes to things that are too far away to be seen with the naked eye like distant Galaxies or a bacterium, too small to be seen without a microscope we don't say that these do not exist because we can’t see them. We can enhance our senses through the use of special instruments: telescopes for the galaxy, microscopes for bacteria. How about radio waves? Do they exist? Our eyes can’t detect them, nor can our ears, but again special instruments – television sets, for example – convert them into signals that we can see and hear. As with telescopes and microscopes, we understand how radios and televisions work. So they help our senses to build a picture of what exists: the real world – reality.
Or take dinosaurs. They don't exist anymore, but we have fossils of them we can work out that they must have existed, using indirect evidence that still ultimately reaches us through our senses: we see and touch the stony traces of ancient life.
Blind people are surrounded with people who can tell them there are colors and although they can't see them they can understand that they exist because of nature of light and how it refracts.
Or what about are there aliens in outer space? We’ve never seen or heard them so we don't know if they're real. Nobody knows; but we do know what kind of things could one day tell us if they are. If ever we got near to an alien, our sense organs could tell us about it. Reality doesn’t just consist of the things we already know about: it also includes things that exist but that we don’t know about yet and won’t know about until some future time, perhaps when we have built better instruments to assist our five senses.
Atoms have always existed, but people became sure of their existence only recently and it is likely that our descendants will know about many more things that.
BUT this doesn’t mean we should believe just anything that anybody might dream up: there is infinite amount of things we can imagine but which are highly unlikely to be real – flying penis, fairies, gods, giants, leprechauns... We should always be open-minded, but the only good reason to believe that something exists is if there is real evidence that it does.
Thanks for the ramble though.