(January 13, 2015 at 12:34 pm)Esquilax Wrote: Does it bother anyone else that Drich's argument here, boiled down, is nothing more than: "Your argument would only make sense if we knew, but since we don't know, you must be wrong."You also have to ask: can't this be applied to other religions that are dependent on documents that were hundreds or thousands of years old and poorly-preserved?
I mean, I get that the argument from silence is a thing, but the two things that come to my mind there is that if we had a lack of evidence for a thing we'd expect silence, and that once again a christian's position hinges solely on ignorance.
And you have to wonder: if the smoking-gun documents were lost before they could be used to confirm the veracity of what you believe, then maybe god needed a modern filing system. Here were the keys to eternity for all of humanity, and Yahweh couldn't find a flash drive in time to preserve it for posterity.
"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
