(March 4, 2014 at 5:29 pm)Wyrd of Gawd Wrote: Well it's obvious that since some skeptics attribute the incident to the God character at all just shows how brainwashed people really are. They claim that there is no celestial deity yet they give him credit for all sorts of acts. They are as fanatical believers as the most brainwashed fundie.It's a story, a tale, a myth. Why wouldn't we treat the characters in the story as exactly what they are? Recognizing that god empowered a man to send bears after kids in a story doesn't mean we believe god exists outside of the story. If I were explaining the plot of an Iron Man film, no one would accuse me of believing that there was a man who built the suit in real life.
"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
