(August 17, 2013 at 1:37 pm)Undeceived Wrote: What about optical illusions? Or how about this: does everything exist exactly as you see it? The sun looks perfectly spherical--are we justified in believing it is indeed a sphere? Can you confidently call a rock a rock without examining it to the last atom? Where do you draw the line between a rock and a boulder? Is that line verifiable... or do you the categories come from your head?
About halfway through this, I began reading it in Laurence Fishburne's voice.
"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
