(December 18, 2013 at 11:47 am)Lemonvariable72 Wrote: Okay drich how do you explain people like me who followed the instructions in luke 11 and got nothing?
I think it's some combination of either "you didn't ask the right way" or "god spoke and you didn't listen" or "keep asking, you need to be patient" and there's always "you're lying" if the others don't seem sufficient. I would note that this is one of those areas where "I don't know" would be a perfectly valid response, but from my time as a believer I can not recall a single time that a fellow theist said that. It's as if we feared that our belief system was so fragile that any doubt was harmful to it. We see much of that here in the many attempts to fit god into gaps in our knowledge, as if not knowing for certain is dangerous.
"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
