(December 27, 2014 at 8:29 am)tantric Wrote: Many people, even most people, treat science like magic and scientists like priests.That may be the view of the disinterested layperson regarding stuff like physics, which might seem like magic without any context or understanding. Most people treat science like what it is: a way to learn about the world around us, which happens to produce the technology that we tend to take for granted even though it might seem like magic.
I find that most people treat god like magic and priests like priests, then project that worldview onto anyone who doesn't believe in god because pretending that they substituted one "god" for another is less stressful than thinking that they might be onto something.
"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
