(April 24, 2014 at 6:05 pm)fr0d0 Wrote: The real problem, if you want to try and address it, is that god cannot be disproven ... which is frustrating for the atheist who wants to dismiss it.I think the frustration is from the fact that god cannot be proven, and therefore the claim that he cannot be disproven is used to try to settle the matter. I think that in our day-to-day lives, for anything other than god and sports, we are willing to dismiss things that we cannot prove or disprove (I'm looking at you, "clutch hitting"). While the references to things like Santa Claus or unicorns are made semi-seriously, they do show that most of the time we easily reject such ideas on the basis that if you can't prove it, I don't need to treat it as anything but a myth.
"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
