(April 16, 2014 at 1:59 pm)elconquistador Wrote: I am atheist, I very much dislike religion, but I don't dislike the idea of a God, a Divine Creator, and I do not discourage the pursuit of evidence of that creator.I would neither discourage nor encourage it. But science need not look for god so much as it needs to continue to try and learn how things around us work. If god is anywhere there, I agree that we will eventually find him, unless she wishes to never be found.
I like the idea of gods in the same way I like the idea of any fantasy creature. It sounds pretty cool as long as we envision it as relatively pleasant (ie, dragons sound cool until they decide to turn your neighborhood into a slag heap). However, unless he has a very good explanation for what we are going through, I'm not sure I'd want there to be a god that created the universe we live in and has allowed the world to develop as it has. Because he sounds, at best, as if he is incapable of empathy. At worst, he likes what he sees. And that would be scary.
"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
