(January 27, 2015 at 10:28 pm)Rhythm Wrote: @Tonus...Trouble is this...we've actually found that it's -not- at all impossible to determine that. Some clearly are. Even worse, some surprising things can be -reprogrammed-, even when we think we've chosen them....essentially on a whim...takes very little.I'm thinking in the pragmatic sense, where we might wonder if it would make a difference if we knew for certain one way or another. If the decisions and choices that brought me to this point were or were not unavoidable, I still got this far. Essentially the next step is to recognize that if it had been different, then it would... be different... probably. Not worth the concern, in my opinion.
I think the argument only matters to theists who want to use it as a way of getting god off the hook, and I think that's the only reason it's ever up for consideration.
"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
