(October 7, 2013 at 12:36 pm)Sword of Christ Wrote: If you actually met an angel or a demon you would know they exist and some people may well have done though I haven't myself.
Me either. One of the things I noticed over time was that there were no shortages of stories of such experiences with ghosts or demons or angels and so on. Yet I cannot recall any that were first-person. Lots of third and fourth-person accounts of amazing experiences that had happened to a friend-of-a-friend or a distant relative or someone else who you probably wouldn't ever get the chance to speak with directly.
And all of them sound preposterous to anyone who isn't already primed to believe in such things. Even the people who told those stories (and clearly believed them) would scoff at any fanciful story about things that they were not primed to accept, such as space aliens or Bigfoot. And even the ones they accepted were conditional; if a person from another denomination or religion spoke of seeing an angel, this was likely to be scoffed at or attributed to demons.
I don't think any of the people relaying (and judging the veracity of) these stories realized just how carefully they were filtering the information in order to confirm their beliefs. Magical creatures that fit into their worldview? Definitely happened as was claimed. Magical creatures that didn't fit? Person must be mistaken, or seeing things, or fooled by the magical creatures that they know exist.
"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
