(July 1, 2015 at 9:28 am)Little Rik Wrote: People should stick to what they know.
The people who have been making discoveries about the mind and the brain were studying what they know, and learning more as they went along. It may seem as if they are turning your world on its ear, but much of this stuff was starting to be understood more than a century ago and much of the present work is building on research that is 30-50 years old. This isn't something that they're beginning to piece together; it's the result of decades of ongoing research and experimentation.
In other words, you are clinging to beliefs that were already becoming obsolete when you first heard about them. Today they only survive because so many people stubbornly hang on to them in the face of growing evidence to the contrary. A few hundred years ago people may have believed that the earth was the center of the universe. A few hundred years from now they'll be mocking us for believing in spirits and souls. Your gods are being trampled under the inexorable march of progress.
"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
