Normally, most folks start at the beginning of things. But I'd like to start 'fore the beginning by getting a couple of things straightened out 'fore we jump into what Dicky Dawkins has to say 'bout "Reality". The first thing we need to get straight is that, whenever I use the words "real" and "reality", go ahead and consider them to be in quotation marks at all times. The main reason for that is 'cause nobody knows what is real and what ain't - not you, not me, not even Dicky. At best, all any of us can say is, "This is what I choose to believe is real". Sorry if that comes as a bit of a shock to you, but that's just the way things is. It ain't for lack of trying, though. Folks have been trying to discover what constitutes real and reality ever since there was folks, but the sad truth is that we cain't know 100% for sure 'bout reality 'cause of the way we're built. (More on why that's so in later posts.)
The second thing to get straight is that, even if someone really was able to discover what constitutes what is real and what is reality, there ain't no way for them to prove it. Now, this is an interesting trend I've noticed over the past couple of decades. When I first started paying attention to all the contrariness being carried on 'tween religious folks and non-religious folks, a lot of what you saw flying around was challenges to "prove" this or that statement. ("Prove God exists." "Prove God doesn't exist." "Prove evolution." That kind of thing.) Then, slowly, things began to change. Mostly it seemed to start with the non-religious folks claiming things like they didn't have to prove the non-existence of a deity 'cause the burden of proof falls on the person making the assertive statement. (i.e. the one making the statement that something "is" has to back up their statement, not the person claiming that something "isn't". That's also when they usually start throwing 'round phrases like "argumentum ad ignorantiam" to make themselves sound educated and important.) Then I noticed a new tack most non-religious folks started taking claiming that "proof" only existed for math and courts, so they didn't need to "prove" their claims. Instead of proof, they'd start babbling 'bout their "evidence".
Which brings us to the third thing we need to get straight. Things are what they are and they don't become evidence until someone comes along and decides to define them as evidence of this or that thing. It's as simple as that. One of my favorite examples of this made a bit of news a few years back. That was the so-called "dinosaurs dance floor". A University of Utah geologist visited an area in northern Arizona containing a lot of depressions in the rock which he concluded were evidence of dinosaur tracks. Then, along came the paleontologists who looked at the same area and determined that what the geologist claimed was evidence of dinosaur tracks was actually just evidence of a bunch of pot-holes eroded into the rock. So, two groups of scientists looking at the exact same thing, both claiming they was evidence of two completely differ'nt things. (And 'member, neither side claimed that the "evidence" supported a finding that fell into their sphere of speciality.) In short, just 'cause someone claims something is evidence of something don't make it evidence of that thing. Evidence is nothing more than a scaffolding on which to hang a belief.
