(May 10, 2025 at 7:35 pm)John 6IX Breezy Wrote:(May 10, 2025 at 5:14 pm)Belacqua Wrote: Dawkins and Hitchens, for example, conceived of God in the simplest, most childish way possible, and then (no surprise) decided that the God they had imagined didn't exist. But there are better books.
The problem is also true of scientific theories. The models you remember from grade school of atoms and solar systems are all false. If you try to find them in nature you'll come back empty handed. They are abstractions and approximations. And you can imagine why: because what a model or theory aims to do isn't exactly to map out reality, it's to make reality comprehendible for our brains, and that will never exist on a 1 to 1 ratio.
You might wish to distinguish between gross oversimplifications taught to grade-schoolers and scientific theories. I'm sure that they must have covered that in Philosophy of Science.
