General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Neil deGrasse Tyson destroys argument for intelligent design [View all]hifiguy
(33,688 posts)I have found that one of the most illuminating is to call one group "believers" in the sense that they deeply feel some need to believe in something, usually religion, and one group "skeptics" who always ash "why" particularly when confronted with non-provable received "wisdom."
I was born a skeptic. I seriously doubted the existence of the Abrahamic "god" by the time I was 8 or 10 because the fairy tales made far less sense than Santa Claus, was an agnostic strongly leaning towards atheism by 16 or so, and finally puton my big-boy shoes and got off the fence when I saw "Cosmos" when it first ran. Skeptics are the people who are responsible for, I would argue, all human progress. They want to know what and why. Believers are content to moo their way through life without ever wondering.
"These are a few of the things hydrogen atoms can do given 14 billion years."
"I'd rather know than believe."
Carl Sagan, who remains to this day one of my bare handful of personal heroes.
And when people say "science hasn't disproved the existence of god" I remind them that we humans are pretty new to this "science" thing. Three hundred years ago women were burned as witches when there were outbreaks of disease. We've come rather a long way from Galileo and Newton to relativity and the quantum, but we still have a long, long ways to go in our understanding of this vast and wonderful universe.