(September 26, 2014 at 10:17 am)Jenny A Wrote: You've been watching the indicators for 40 years?Some cults have been "watching" much longer than that. The list of false and mistaken predictions of the end of the world (or some similarly momentous god-driven event) runs more than a thousand years (two?). Our ability to record these statements for posterity and make them easily available to a great number of people today does not seem to have slowed the pace. It's almost as if they are hoping to precipitate the end of the world by setting a date.
"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