Maggie's Farm

The inherent, Darwinian superiority of what survived what was really various localized cataclysm, right? Given the narrated trajectory of ancient text and lore, how Darwin fits in and around groups with presumably high theology, traditional lectionaries, and faith always escapes me. And history.

The reasons something went extinct had little to nothing to do with adaptability and survivability. They had far more to do with immediate circumstance and fate. (Or in our case, the unmitigated foolishness of our collective systems*, which come to think of it, has a Darwinian ring to it.) Auroch are cattle that simply went away with scores of other stuff when things went haywire. It's more than alluded to in your Bible and it's in all ancient lore of similar note.

The standard, big-bangist, evolutionary, survival-of-the-fittest, quiescent model - *which is an ode to the human self by proud humanists more than anything - is taking some serious hits.

Notwithstanding the lore of "the generations of Adam", Hebrew creation isn't in play; history is. Regardless, reflexive anti-creationists are a dead habit walking.

Science hasn't answered the how at all, and until it can reconcile big-bangerist spontaneous existence with thermodynamics, never will. The why of it is a matter of philosophy, of course, at least a couple of levels removed from this sensory, theorizing Science! you speak of, the one where it's somehow scientific to conflate Genesis with Darwin or whatever that scientism thing is you're doing with its creation myth and all.

Donnie, on the other hand, only needs to reconcile the yelling in his head. As long as it place-holds for reason, it works and bangerism works too, somehow, all you KKKreationistas, you.

The upshot is that neither either account for existence or refute any particular rational model of how it came to pass. Creation and creationists, whoever they are, have nothing to do with it.

Since I haven't said, you have no idea what I believe. While I don't intend to defend myself, what I know is obvious: Any insightful, open-minded study of modern cosmology and astrophysics these days finds that cult of Einstein's slide rule you're still hanging onto by a thread, along with its relativistic, gravitational model, full of enough holes to be obsolete. To hear him speak about it, Al likely knew it himself, but we must and will have our latter day scientific faiths like the one you're hitched to.

The academy long ago accepted that stars, for example, weren't furnaces - faith in that model demands fealty to the lord your god Gravity to arrange them from spontaneous hydrogen or something - but more like energetic states arranged like lights on a universal transmission web of plasma and charge separation. It's just the pop culture that still blindly believes in gravitational models and bangism and black matter holes and whatnot.

Which raises the question why we'll bow trembling to the spontaneous attraction between our nice spontaneous matter but pull up sharp when confronted with a model that has far more in synch with the reports from ancient wisdom than either the relativistic new-but-obsolete big banger universe or the 6,000 year old earth.

Or take comets: Not an icy snowball among them as it turns out, which blows the Ort Cloud and its big bangerista model of formation kinda to smithereens.

Got it now? I said this but over there in your echoing chamber big bangerism is Science! and you assumed dissent is heresy against Science!, no matter that cosmology has been lately rendered a monkey's barrel from which "we're going to have to rewrite everything" has become the twice-weekly press release.

Yet you'll happily tell me anyway.

I apologize. I thought you said science can only answer the how - which on good days we know it may - in the context of the nonsensical creation vs evolution dynamic, which is really just a skirmish for folks wrongly invoking Science! on the one side and God in the other. I don't know what you meant, so kindly carry on.



Genesis has slowly over time become the enlightened G-d-believer's contemporary, secular, wholly [i]scientific answer to embarrassing, strict 6,000-year-old Earth zealots. This faith in the science of our gods Tyson and Hawking fails to regard that there is no evolutionary track in Genesis, none whatsoever.

There is what can be loosely construed as a methodical (but still divine) creation - referred to by that name and said to have been impossibly spoken into existence, so let's give the author his intent - that can and does these days somehow get jammed in alongside zillions of years of Darwinistic expansion in that other creation myth, the big bang's spontaneous, from-nothing miracle of matter eventually composing mind and other such impossibilities.

Which goes back to the original point: Extinct species no more fell to their incompetence than man rose solely by his own merit. There's vastly more to history and natural phenomenon than that self-indulgent narrative. The ancients knew it but somehow we're better than to grasp that, the foolish superstitious clods that they were.

Assuming your first paragraph is the pure sarcasm it's written as, the rest of that is really low-hanging fruit, Don. Is tilting at creationists still scientism's larger paradigm? (Though I'll concede that actually doubting KJ's divinity - in public! - is ballsy stuff for any Donnie.)

I suppose you could say I'm not up to "speed" on Sunday's match between Big Banger and The 6,000 Year Old Earth over there in your squared circle.

My Bible? How obtuse. Come on counselor, badgering the witness again and again when you have no case is how you get yanked to the bench for a little chat. You going to keep this up long? Don't even recognize your own crap?

And the cow jumped over the moon. I would have thought you at least knew how to compose a proper argument, counselor.

How do you reckon that with $150T of public debt and unfunded obligations? Not to mention bank debt.

Half a million per man, woman, and child is rich. If you don't have to balance the books.