|
|
Re: On credulity and religion
Bryant (mycol1@unm.edu)
13 Jul 1996 12:38:28 -0600
>Suppose I do not accept your statement Darwin existed. How would you
>force me to accept your beliefs as true?
Obviously, I could not. You could claim the photos, diaries, recorded
conversations, publications, and descendents were fakes, and then smugly
claim that Santa Claus, for whom no such evidence is to be had,
*does* exist.
It's called not having a standard of evidence. Plenty of folks, in
academia's humanities departments and in Churches, make a clever
sophist's living at it. Most of them, however, go to doctors when
they're ill, because they know that prayer or semantic deconstruction is
not as efficient in the battle against what ails them as antibiotics
are. And there's the rub: hypothetico-deductive science allows us to
understand aspects of the world well enough to manipulate them. (The
atomic bomb is a horrible example.) That to me seems like powerful
evidence that the hypothetico-deductive method is on to something.
Bryant
|