RE: How to tell a real freethinker
March 21, 2013 at 9:52 am
(This post was last modified: March 21, 2013 at 9:53 am by Tonus.)
(March 20, 2013 at 11:06 pm)radorth Wrote: I could go on, but the point is that real freethinkers include many highly intelligent and skeptical people who became Christians. They believe partly because they are skeptical of mindless skepticism, of the simplistic, illogical and gratuitous arguments that the Gospels are false records. They realize that the burden is on the critic to prove they are false. Calling people deluded or dishonest requires proof, especially when they had nothing to gain but persecution. (A historic fact).
If a person making a claim does not offer any proof and makes claims of "evidence" that are specious at best and utterly ridiculous at worst and wraps it all in a mess of confusing and/or idiotic rationalizations, then I think that's plenty of proof that they are either deluded or dishonest.
I readily admit that I cannot disprove god. I spent decades believing in god wholeheartedly, but never managed to scrounge up any proof, just the awkward "evidence" and unconvincing "arguments" that so many theists tend to throw up as a shield. If he's out there and you can prove it, that's great. If your argument is that, 'gosh... he's too darned clever to be found' then we're back at square one.
"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