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From: mangoe@umcp-cs.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Newsgroups: net.religion
Subject: Re: Re: Science as Religion (other objec
Message-ID: <1018@umcp-cs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 12-Nov-84 17:07:05 EST
Article-I.D.: umcp-cs.1018
Posted: Mon Nov 12 17:07:05 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 13-Nov-84 06:06:16 EST
References: <704@umcp-cs.UUCP> <8300063@uokvax.UUCP>
Reply-To: mangoe@maryland.UUCP (Charley Wingate)
Organization: U of Maryland, Computer Science Dept., College Park, MD
Lines: 31

In article <8300063@uokvax.UUCP> emjej@uokvax.UUCP writes:

>Pliny reported all sorts of marvelous creatures. Do you have the same
>position on their existence that you do on the veracity of the Bible?
>Similarly, Aristotle reported that women have fewer teeth than men.
>In the absence of reports to the contrary, should we give any credence
>to the possibility that women have come to have more teeth than they
>did in the time of Aristotle?

Pliny and Aristotle are making theoretical claims about the way the
world functions; these are not claims of miracles.  As malformed 
scientific theories, they are subject to contradiction by CURRENT 
observation.  The ressurection makes little or no claim about the
present observable behavior of the world.  It says that precisely
one man rose from the dead at a particular time in the past.  It is an
untestable statement from the point of view of science.

>Based on the lack of physical evidence, and the observed current and
>past tendencies of people to believe practically anything, I simply
>estimate the likelihood of the truth of Christianity as being on the
>same order as that of the validity of Uri Geller's claims, and hence
>not worth worrying about, save as it influences other people's behavior
>(and hence might get me burned at the stake :->), not to mention being
>the source of some very good art and music. (One can't say the latter
>about ESP proponents, admittedly.) This is not to say that the sort
>of discussion one finds in net.religion* isn't interesting at times.

Fine.  My point throughout this discussion has been that such an evaluation
is subjective, and in the same way as mine is.

Charley Wingate   umcp-cs!mangoe