stephen_33 wrote:
There comes a point in the understanding of how natural processes work (/have worked throughout time), when it's fair to say that no reasonable doubt is left and we can say that we know something to be the case. It's an acceptable shorthand.
Do we 'know' that the Earth orbits the Sun, not the other way around ...... yet?
And I'm not the one for whom the enormous spans of time required for multicellular life to arise are a problem: It's those proposing a non-natural explanation who need to make their model fit.
Isaac Newton:
- "Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion."
How it began is very important, suggesting a natural cause is required limits the possiblitys.
I simply pick and choose my topics, don't you? I do like coding, I spent years in R&D for a semiconductor company working on the back end where we tested the new products before they could be sold. We validated and qualified the next-generation CPU. So truth tables, facts, and validation were my life for nearly 20 years. When I realized I could code in Korn and Perl in the UNIX environment I discovered I could string together my commands, take the outputs of the test, and start the next test with what I needed I became more efficient, turning some jobs that used to take hours touching several testers one at a time for each test, to loading up the nights works once and once done it would write my passdown.
That sounds interesting. I never took my programming anywhere. Because I enjoyed it as a hobby I started a degree in computing around 1991 and after passing the first year with high marks I realised they were trying to teach me something I didn't want to learn. Top-down programming was just starting. They thought they had all the space they would ever need whereas my interest was in writing extremely compact, efficient, fast programs for number-crunching. I was being taught to write inefficient stuff which anyone could understand and therefore modify.
I switched my degree from computing to philosophy. My interest may have served as a role model because my son, who was 4 in 1991, now works in computing as head of a data analysis section. He's finding it interesting and stimulating and the money's good because he has a physics PhD.
Well done