(March 20, 2014 at 2:00 am)Alex K Wrote: I don't think that there is some singular real truth to our existence beyond the incremental improvement of knowledge provided by the sciences. That's an invention by the religions. I am not frustrated at all by the absence of a deep meaning of life and all the rest, the only thing that bugs me is that the week after I die, they will probably discover something really cool that I miss. Assholes.I think this is as good a way of putting it as I've seen.
I have also come to think that reaching some end point, some point where we learn that final "truth" of everything, would be the most depressing moment for anyone. What do you do when you've learned everything there is to learn, or know everything there is to know? That's when we start to die.
"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
