(March 27, 2015 at 12:15 pm)professor Wrote: The deeper we go, the more the rabbit hole dives down under us.I think it's true that we are driven by a strong desire to know. Which makes sense from an evolutionary standpoint: the creatures who survive are the ones who decide to run when they hear the bushes rustle, while the ones who take a 'wait and see' approach may learn that it was just the wind... or run into a tiger.
Complexity and inter-relations stare us in the face, so we make guesses to comfort ourselves because we LIKE to have answers.
We hate being in the dark, it is the way we are made.
But it's been centuries since people started to try to work around that limitation in human thinking, by introducing and refining the scientific method, which tries to strip away as much noise as possible in order to make learning more efficient. We added steps to the part where we "make guesses" so that the answers we end up with get closer and closer to the truth as we continue to learn.
You pray to god and then try to discern whether or not he answered your call. Then you pick up a tiny electronic device and almost immediately reach another human and have a conversation. You believe that the former works. You know that the latter does. That's the difference that only centuries of doing more than just guessing can make.
"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