(April 1, 2015 at 10:43 pm)xmark27 Wrote: Then tell me Tonus once again why you don't believe.
Because there is no evidence to support the existence of any of the gods that men worship. Because the books that those gods supposedly wrote are not any different from any of the other myths and legends and simple moral fables that men wrote or told in those days. Because those gods tend to display some of the worst and most twisted power fantasies of ambitious and tyrannical men. Because the more we learn about our world and our universe and ourselves, the more we realize that none of it requires a god. Because not a single one of those gods has ever led his followers to a level that clearly distinguishes them from any other people who followed any other god, or none at all.
When I removed the presuppositions and pre-existing ideas that I had accepted without verification, I found that there was nothing to support the idea that god exists. If I must first believe in order to believe, then belief is useless. When I made belief useful, god vanished.
"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
