Dec 20 2007
I know you believe
The most distinguishing aspect of belief is that there is the possibility that the thing one believes is false. We all believe a few things, especially what we’ll have for dinner tomorrow. In an astonishing display of denial, many supernaturalists insist that evolution is a belief. It’s true that we’ll never have a complete fossil record of every generation of every species, thus we are forced to speculate and thus believe certain specific scenarios took place. But we don’t have to believe in evolution as a whole. We know that mutations take place and we know that nature provides pressure to select the most adapt individuals, thus we know evolution is a fact.
The two main arguments about knowing things from science and philosophy come from the quantum and matrix worlds. In the quantum world, pundits claim that since we can not know where a particle is or how fast it’s going with absolute certainty we are forced to believe in its existence. Luckily most of the particles we interact with are clustered up into atoms and molecules. We don’t have to believe they’re there, we just have to except that our knowledge of they’re exact location will always remain undetermined. Continue Reading »
