RE: Atheists, tell me, a Roman Catholic: why should I become an atheist?
December 17, 2016 at 9:46 am
(December 17, 2016 at 2:18 am)Rhythm Wrote: Bare /w me,Not in this weather!
Quote: but, if our minds are hueristic machines...then they assume that -something- is true for no reason at all, just a practical necessity. They wouldn't work otherwise...or, at least, we don't understand how they -could- work otherwise.Yeah, I think that our need to know is very strong. Along with such a large part of our brain dedicated to automated processing, it leads to an organism whose quirks become more pronounced as we become more sophisticated.
"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