(June 26, 2014 at 4:18 am)fr0d0 Wrote: The cave man says "Ug! Show me the evidence!". He was unable to think beyond what he could sense.He was also a slave to ignorance. If he saw lightning, he might ascribe it to an angry god or demon. As he learned more about the world around him, those explanations were replaced by natural ones. But he never let go of the idea that the things he couldn't yet explain had to have a supernatural explanation. It's not that he learned to reason, it's that he won't let go of the intuition that has failed him time and again.
"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
