Caesar, God, and Rendering

[elaison]

Define "fact."

Some may subscribe to "fact" being "knowledge or information based on real occurrences" or perhaps "something demonstrated to exist or known to have existed." In the context of this particular article on schools teaching evolution, the most appropriate definition seems to be one used in the legal system, i.e., "the aspect of a case

Comments

[anonymous]

I would say that knowledge is a systemized body of pieces of information that can be shown to have an objective reality.

Your point, though, is still valid in the face of that definition. I can't think of anything offhand that has a probability of exactly zero. As someone once pointed out, I look at my hand and see five fingers, and I behave as if I had five fingers, but perhaps my whole existence is the hallucination of a seven-fingered man. "Pieces of information that can be shown to have an objective reality" may not in fact have an objective reality. I suspect that most of us just drop that caveat in ordinary conversation, if we're aware of it at all. We'd have to, or we wouldn't get anything done.

Anyway, thanks for the link. It's amazing what the purported defenders of scientific inquiry will do in the name of science.

It especially seems silly to me to get all riled up about a disclaimer on a textbook about how evolution is a theory. Sure, "Just a theory!" may be a rallying cry for the young-earth crowd, but to the extent that the anti-ID crowd claims to represent science, it's hard to see how they could object so fiercely to such a tautology. Evolution IS a theory; it has provided hypotheses testable under certain conditions, and is not universally accepted. (That's the best definition of "theory" to me, anyway.) If anything, the judge who ordered the disclaimer removed should have done so on the basis that the money spent on ink and adhesive was a waste of taxpayer dollars.

I'm a small-s skeptic and as secular as they come, but I wonder if it occurs to people like that judge that militant secularism in this arena can sometimes breed the same narrow-mindedness as the non-creationists-shall-perish-and-burn-in-hell crowd.

--MDR

[elaison]

Just a touch of tolerance, understanding, and civility... that's all I'm asking.

Ah, if it were only as simple as that.