| What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. -- Christopher Hitchens |
People try to make sense of what they see. When we have no good
explanation, we use the best one we have. We don't just go generation
after generation saying, "we don't know." Sometimes our explanations turn
out to be wrong. For example, people used to think rocks grew. There is
evidence for this. If you grade a field so it's smooth and take out all
the rocks you can find, after a few years there will be rocks sticking up
through the ground. Well, alright, that was a long time ago and since
then we learned not to just make things up - or did we? Twenty years ago we
all believed that dinosaurs became extinct because they had small brains
and got outsmarted by other animals (mammals, of course), but now we found
out a big asteroid hit the earth and killed them all.
We modern people have no trouble understanding that primitive tribal
people made up gods to explain why things happen. We can accept that the
ancient greeks made up their gods out of their imagination and desire to
understand. We look at these other people and "know" that they were
simply wrong. Meanwhile, we worship gods passed down to us for
thousands of years by people who misunderstood many things we
know the truth about today.