(May 31, 2014 at 12:44 pm)vodkafan Wrote: Here's just a flight of fancy. Suppose there was an atheist "See the truth" ray and everybody forgot about religion overnight ...what sort of society would we like to see set up?What sort would I like to see, or what sort would I expect to see? I'd like to see one where the human instinct for forming tribal groups and defending them irrationally disappeared along with religion. I expect that it would not, and that there would still be plenty of ways in which we would split into groups and waste far too much precious time fighting over trivial differences.
Although the primary difference would have to be the recognition that the life we have is the one shot that we get, which might just force people to be more cooperative. At least in regards to areas like technology and medicine and genetics, since we would be more inclined to actually try to find solutions to many of our problems instead of just waiting for some outside agent to solve them eventually.
"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
