(April 11, 2014 at 12:41 pm)mrandredparis Wrote: I have wanted to learn the lessons from The Manual for Creating Atheists for awhile, or at least since I read it. But one of the stumbling blocks I have is offering something to theists that would replace things like the personal relationship, through prayer and heaven. Any thoughts?Presumably, if you convince someone that the god they had a personal relationship never existed, then they would be expected to replace it with relationships with real people. Or a whole new imaginary friend. Or nothing at all, which is what it was in the first place. Tell them to pretend that they had their sixth finger amputated from each hand.
"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
