(June 12, 2015 at 10:50 am)Randy Carson Wrote: Is this hypothetical? Or are you seriously willing to consider the matter?Hypothetical. I seriously considered the matter for the better part of 30 or 35 years before realizing that I did not believe, and further inquiry just confirms the doubt. The discrepancies between denominations and individuals only became clear after I stepped outside of the bubble of my particular branch of Christianity, but it also helped me see that many (if not most, or all) of them require that you shield at least some of your beliefs from scrutiny. At least one of the reasons for my leaving religious faith behind was that I tried pretty hard to test those shields, and that's not a good thing to do if you want to remain faithful.
"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