(June 3, 2015 at 6:38 pm)ronedee Wrote: I'm looking for any of you to put up arguments of factual truth, in contrast to what I believe is truth.Factual truth won't take us into the spiritual or metaphysical domains that most theists consider to be the basis of the evidence for their beliefs. The most it can do is teach us about the physical world and how it works, which might allow us to recognize the supernatural if we ever saw it (for example, walking on the surface of a lake as if it were dry ground would be supernatural based on our understanding of how water behaves). You have the same factual truths about the world that we do, but you interpret it through a lens that assumes the supernatural can happen because you read it in a book and perhaps through the never-confirmed experiences that others (or even you) have claimed to witness. I can't convince you that what you believe is false, because your filter makes exceptions for it. You can't convince me that what you believe is true, because I discarded that filter years ago.
Perhaps the most useful path is to study the filter.
"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
