[ExI] Tolerance

[Dave Sill]

On Mon, Dec 7, 2009 at 8:20 PM, Brent Neal <brentn at freeshell.org> wrote:
>
> ... I fully expect that at sometime in the far future,
> our descendants will be laughing at our "juvenlie superstitions" (to quote
> Dawkins) about synthetic biology and string theory. :)

It's one thing to be wrong about something based on incomplete
evidence or lack of understanding and another to believe something
that's contradictory to all evidence because it offers a comforting
explanation.

The person holding a wrong belief due to incomplete evidence or lack
of understanding will automatically adjust their beliefs when new
evidence is discovered, but the person believing a made up story about
a supreme being will adjust their interpretation of contrary evidence
to make it consistent with their beliefs.

We find it amusing that people used to think the Sun revolved around
the Earth, but those people believed that because that's the way it
looked to them, and they had no evidence to the contrary. But people
believing in religions do so in the face of overwhelming evidence that
their beliefs are highly unlikely to be correct and with only the
scantiest evidence that they're true.

-Dave