(December 6, 2014 at 12:01 pm)Godschild Wrote: I do understand this and did before I came to this forum. My problem is atheist seem to refuse anything we state, no consideration of it's possible validity. To totally disregard the Bible just because one doesn't like what said in it IMO is being dishonest.Bold mine.
That's kind of bizarre. It's possible that someone rejects the Bible because they have heard of the terrible things in it and don't have a coherent idea of what it contains in total. But I think that most of us know what it promises-- an end to wickedness and suffering and an eternal life of happiness. No reasonable person would find that objectionable. I just don't believe that it's the word of god, and therefore the promises are not real. I think it has validity as a window into the people and culture that wrote its stories, as well as the socio-politics of the people and culture that assembled it in its present form. But I don't give it any more import than that, because I do not believe that god wrote it.
"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
