(June 14, 2014 at 1:47 pm)Lek Wrote: If the overwhelming majority of people have believed in God, I would put a lot of weight on that.If the overwhelming majority of people throughout human history had believed in the exact same god, I would put a lot of weight on that. If their experiences with the supernatural were remarkably similar, so that a pattern could be easily seen across the testimony of many people, even when they had never met one another, that would make me sit up and take notice. If the prayers of one group of believers came true every time under the same circumstances, and those of everyone else never did, that would be compelling evidence.
People have worshiped literally thousands (and possibly millions) of gods, and even most religions that worship the same god do so in different ways; in some cases they regard one another as apostates. People from those religions report miracles and answered prayers that they insist prove the veracity of their god, while usually dismissing the reported miracles and answered prayers of other religions (sometimes as being the work of evil forces!). Either god has allowed people to experience him in a manner so random and scattered that he wanted it to seem as if he didn't exist... or he doesn't exist.
"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
