(May 23, 2013 at 5:45 pm)Statler Waldorf Wrote: Fair enough; sometime I would be very interested in hearing how you derive your concept of how things ought to be from the way things really are. The Hefner reference killed me; that was very good by the way.
Glad you enjoyed it.
I wanted to respond to the bolded part above and wanted to be sure that I understood what you are asking. When you refer to things as they really are, do you mean the world we live in that we can see and interact with, or does this include areas where our beliefs do not overlap?
Thank you for the response to the other questions/points that I did not quote here.
"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