(March 19, 2015 at 9:09 pm)professor Wrote: So you are left with obtaining your own first hand experiences when the curtain of the AC rises and you are confronted with concentrated evil.Some version of this has been thrown at the world at various times during the past several centuries. There's a reason why we reject those prophecies and personal experiences: they never amount to anything more than bluster. I suppose that each of us has a threshold of just how many failed predictions and unverifiable experiences we will listen to before we decide it's all a sham. I've lived long enough to see at least a half-dozen end-of-world predictions come and go, along with more fantastic testimonials than I can recall. So you'll forgive me if I shrug my shoulders at the prospect of yet another non-event not unfolding before the eyes of the world.
"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
