(March 5, 2014 at 5:13 pm)Jacob(smooth) Wrote: On of prof Dawkins statements, under Pascals Wager, was that one can't simply decide to believe in something. I wonder if that's true.It's possible that we can convince ourselves of things that aren't true, I think that is how phobias and other psychological blocks work. Our subconscious can accept pretty much anything as true, and can affect how we approach the real world.
I'm not sure if that means that a person can "choose to believe" something, though. I can't just say to myself "I believe that this is so" and have it happen, but with enough repetition and a heavy dose of confirmation bias I may well become convinced that it is.
"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