(February 4, 2014 at 5:47 pm)Rayaan Wrote: What about you?I find some of the philosophical discussions interesting. I don't take part in them because I think there's a structure to it and I don't understand that structure well enough. I also think that a lot of people who don't understand it try their hand at it and manage to make a mess of any discussion they take part in. Or maybe they do understand and try to muddle the discussion when they feel they're losing the argument. Either way, the discussion becomes incoherent and needlessly complicated.
Sometimes I think philosophical discussions are used for just that reason; it's more effective to wrap an idea or opinion in layers of incomprehensible babble than to lay it out in a logical manner and let people attack it logically.
"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
