(January 13, 2015 at 9:06 pm)professor Wrote: However, there is a big difference between dying (or dying in the process of being a murderer- in the case of Islam) in the belief that action will (by itself) will warrant Paradise, verses being willing to die rather than reject one's belief.The issue in either case is that if the belief is wrong, you wasted your life (and potentially that of others) on something with less value than a stick of gum.
"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
