(April 10, 2014 at 3:39 pm)Beccs Wrote: Argument from personal experience is one that pisses me off.That's less annoying than "I had this experience that I won't explain..." It leads me to think that the experience is the sort of thing that is either easy to offer alternatives for, and/or points to the person being a loon.
"I had this experience I can't explain so you should believe in my god!"
"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
