(November 24, 2014 at 12:32 pm)Rhythm Wrote: I do sometimes think that this "you cannot know" business is just an effect of having had the notion placed on a pedestal for so long.I think that it's used by theists as a way to get around the thorny problem of not being able to produce the necessary evidence for a claim. "You can't say it isn't/didn't" may be unsatisfying (and easily turned around on the person using it), but you can't be picky with your last resort.
"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
