(June 13, 2014 at 6:33 pm)ThomM Wrote: It is simply indoctrination. WE are brought up to believe our parents - and for the most part - we do. Children believe in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy - and others - simply because they are told to do so by their parents. And when they discover they are not true - it is explained away by those parents. It would not dawn on the children - at those ages - to question other supernatural claims.That's how it was for me. Kids believe the things that adults tell them. When it comes to stuff like Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, there comes a point early in their lives when their parents level with them and explain that those are not real. When it comes to god and religion, it must be extremely rare for anyone to take a child aside and explain that god isn't any different than Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. And every other adult insists that god is real, and they paper over any doubts or inconsistencies with a barrage of threats, excuses, rationalizations, and bias-driven mental gymnastics that train the child to defend his belief in god.
It is not very easy to overcome such a deeply-entrenched mindset.
"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
