(May 7, 2014 at 6:31 pm)rexbeccarox Wrote: I don't think the question "is there a god?" can be answered, positively or negatively, with any honesty, and same goes for more specific gods. Granted, they're highly unlikely, and highly improbable- and believe me, I leave no room for them- but I'm not a fan of absolutes when I can't know absolutely.Yeah, but there are a lot of things we can never prove absolutely, yet we treat as if they are not there with a certainty. Heck, some of them are beings that we may have been convinced exist at some point in our lives (Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, the Boogey Man, etc). The main difference, for me, turned out to be that no one ever took me aside and admitted that god was something they made up; I had to figure that one out on my own.
We rely on our senses and our ability to think and reason to get us by from day to day. In that day to day life, we constantly dismiss things and treat them as if they were impossible; we don't even pretend to entertain their existence. If someone was insistent enough, we would admit that we could not prove that a banjo-playing jackrabbit wasn't building a set of thrusters on the moon, which it planned to use to crash it into the Earth. But I am pretty sure we wouldn't lose any sleep over 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
