RE: Atheism and Purpose
August 10, 2010 at 10:35 pm
(This post was last modified: August 11, 2010 at 12:21 am by TheDarkestOfAngels.)
(August 10, 2010 at 5:55 pm)Edward the Theist Wrote: It's not that complicated. It doesn't need scientists to peer review it. The general public can review it and decide.I'm sorry, but truth isn't won by popular vote.
Peer review is done by a community of experts who could put a thoery through the ringer through experimentation and other methods to test a theory's validity.
It's a failing of religion (and conservatives in this country) that popular ideas are directly correlated with the truth of a theory, statement, or whatever.
(August 10, 2010 at 5:55 pm)Edward the Theist Wrote: This article was published on the 10th of August. On the 9th of August we all believed in the hirearchical model. Guess we were wrong. Now we'll believe this bit until, I suppose, October, then it will be something else.Indeed. Science is a self-correcting process where ideas are frequently and fervorently tested, which means that definitions, theories, and 'common knowledge' change with each passing discovery.
That's actually one of the best things about the scientific processes.
If today you can take a thing like evolution and make it a crime to teach in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools and next year you can make it a crime to teach it to the hustings or in the church. At the next session you may ban books and the newspapers...
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
Ignorance and fanaticism are ever busy and need feeding. Always feeding and gloating for more. Today it is the public school teachers; tomorrow the private. The next day the preachers and the lecturers, the magazines, the books, the newspapers. After a while, Your Honor, it is the setting of man against man and creed against creed until with flying banners and beating drums we are marching backward to the glorious ages of the sixteenth centry when bigots lighted fagots to burn the men who dared to bring any intelligence and enlightenment and culture to the human mind. ~Clarence Darrow, at the Scopes Monkey Trial, 1925
Politics is supposed to be the second-oldest profession. I have come to realize that it bears a very close resemblance to the first. ~Ronald Reagan
