(April 23, 2014 at 9:12 pm)ns1452 Wrote: Actually, I would argue that I believe the opposite.You don't have to argue that you believe the opposite, you only have to state it.
What you are discussing in your most recent post would work best if there were only two alternatives: to believe that a specific god exists, or to reject belief in that specific god. But that isn't the case. Around the world, millions (if not billions) of people worship different gods, or different versions of the same god, or the same god with differing interpretations of his plans and desires. At best, your non-empirical method allows you to posit the notion of A god. How do you apply it in order to eliminate all other gods and convince everyone that your specific god is the only real one?
"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