RE: Identifying the word of god
August 18, 2014 at 11:02 am
(This post was last modified: August 18, 2014 at 11:03 am by Tonus.)
(August 17, 2014 at 1:24 pm)robvalue Wrote: Then you are presented with two books. The names aren't important, let's just call them A and B. It has been guaranteed to you somehow that one of these really is the dictated word of god. The other is an elaborate fake, a book written by men to mimic the style of the true book.In the scenario you present there is a god and he has provided humanity with a book, and it is within reach (or even in your possession). That's a lot to presuppose. In such a scenario, I would expect the author of each book to step forward and identify himself. It simply doesn't make sense to me that a deity would write a guidebook so unimpressive that any yahoo can write a convincing fake, or that he'd give us such a guide and then disappear so completely that we're not even sure that the book wasn't human in origin.
"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
