(December 11, 2013 at 4:54 am)GodsRevolt Wrote: You allow for continued development in scientific understanding, but when it comes to religion everything has to be exactly right from the start?We do not expect to approach them the same way. A scientist is trying to understand how the natural world works. This involves a lot of groping about in the dark and building knowledge and taking wrong turns and getting closer and closer to the truth. A religious person believes that there is a being who created everything and therefore knows how it all works and provided a written manifesto of some sort. Why would the religious person not have everything exactly right from the start if he got his owner's manual from the guy who built everything?
"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
