(December 6, 2014 at 1:29 pm)whateverist Wrote: Someone call for a devil's advocate? Internally, I think it is possible for a few well adjusted individuals to hold their religion and science on equal footing. Separate but equal footing. We've seen a couple here. Michael comes to mind. The trick is to be scrupulously clear with yourself which questions fall into which sphere.I was thinking of something a bit different. The way that we can investigate things in the physical world differ from the way we can investigate so-called spiritual phenomena. If a group of people hear a rapping noise against a window, they can investigate and discover the source and confirm it to one another. If they decide to make up an explanation instead, you'll get a whole range of possibilities. And if they are limited to "spiritual" explanations, none of them can be investigated or confirmed.
A wind-blown branch can be confirmed as a culprit. Your dead grandfather's ghost, or the demon Yog'Sothoth, will probably require chemical assistance.
"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
