(October 11, 2013 at 11:36 am)Sword of Christ Wrote: But if you're laying in the gutter you chose to look up at the stars or lay face down in the shit. You aim yourself toward heaven not into the ground.Or conversely, you stop waiting on an invisible hand to be offered and lift yourself out of the gutter.
Sword of Christ Wrote:It will still matter greatly to other people even you apparently don't care either way.I'm sure it matters a great deal to other people, so long as they are alive to consider it. Once they are dead and gone it stops mattering. Once the Sun burns itself out and the Earth is a dead husk, it won't matter to anyone else, either. Why would I care about the condition of the planet several billion years after I am gone?
Sword of Truth Wrote:If you like the idea of being a lumbering robot whose only purpose is to serve as a vehicle for the DNA that controls it as Dawkins put it then you can believe that.You seem to think that the important thing is belief, instead of truth. And that if you can ascribe certain beliefs to me, that somehow makes you feel better about yours? That doesn't make much sense to me.
Sword of Truth Wrote:It doesn't mean you're right or have any particularly good arguments though.That was the point I was making. My beliefs don't change the truth of a matter, and neither do yours. Therefore it isn't the belief that is important, it is the truth.
"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