(August 13, 2014 at 6:36 am)OfficerVajardian Wrote: Also, just wondering, is there actually a refutation to the "Well, God is Mysterious!" argument or is it just an unfalsifiable Creationist/ID escape hatch?I wouldn't say that there is a refutation for that, because it's really just a way of saying "I don't know." You might want to refer to it as the "gaps of the god" approach, but I think people should be encouraged to admit when we lack sufficient knowledge, data, or understanding of something. Now, if they want to treat it as something other than, "I don't know" you might want to press them for an explanation.
"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
