(June 24, 2013 at 4:56 pm)Chuck Wrote: We don't all hang on the same kind of demonstrably wrong beliefs to the same degree. Some of us are susceptible to corrections of biases in many areas.
It is arguable that even of those who hold a particular belief that actually is demonstratably well founded, a significant portion do so not out of reasoned analysis of the soundness of the foundation, but rather out of a fortuitious biase.
Just because you are right, it doesn't mean you are clever and incisive rather than simply fortuiously biased.
I agree. I do think it brings up interesting questions. I became an atheist in part because I tried very hard to make religious belief fit logically into the world around me. I'd like to think that I did so with such sincerity and even-handedness that the outcome was the only possible one, even though it was not the one I intended to reach. But maybe a part of me wanted to ditch religion, for some reason I cannot fathom? Hard to say. I know myself a lot better than I did five or ten years ago, but that's still just scratching the surface, as far as I am concerned.
"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
