(February 7, 2015 at 5:17 am)robvalue Wrote: So the moral of the story is that people can make up stuff for no reason, but there's a chance it could be true?It's a version of Pascal's Wager, which I think fits it perfectly. Because when people offer up Pascal's Wager, they may acknowledge that there are so many options that the odds are very slim that you'll find the right god, but they're absolutely certain that the one they found is the right one. They may not have a shred of evidence for their belief, yet they would compare themselves to a fetus who just happens to guess correctly every single time.
And this doesn't make them stop and think, for some reason.
"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
