(April 23, 2014 at 9:45 pm)DeistPaladin Wrote: You can see why I'm having trouble distinguishing the fundamentalist Christian apologists from the so-called "secular historists" who carry their water. Where do the "historists" draw the line? What sort of skepticism of the Christian tale is allowed in their circles? What do they want?I think it is probably a case of grasping at straws. It is similar to the arguments that try to establish that god has to exist, by exploiting gaps in our knowledge. In either case, the idea is to get a foot in the door and pretend that it means anything more than that. Establishing that there was a man named Jesus who was crucified by the Romans for sedition leaves a person with a very daunting task ahead, in the same way that establishing that god might exist is the easiest step in trying to convince anyone that it happens to be your specific god.
But when that's all you have, you cling to it.
"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
