Pain is Our Best Friend or My Polarised World View

After my argument yesterday that we should not engage creationists because they do not accept scientific method, I read this article with the rather stark title of "Why does God allow natural disasters?" which made for an interesting few minutes without actually answering the question but of course that is what philosophy is for - providing us with the intellectual background to make up our own minds. This sparked the idea that a Creationist would have the same idea as me and refuse to debate with evolutionists because the have no truck with faith. Faith trumps all for a creationist and anything else is just noise as is anything else other than scientific method and logical analysis to an evolutionist. We are as usual talking about spherical chickens in a vacuum and leaving to room for the muddied battlefield between the two trenches.

And back to Dawkins who seemed like an excited child quoting this from Peter Medawar :

Just as compulsory primary education created a market catered for by cheapdailies and weeklies, so the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large population of people, often with well-developed literary and scholarly tastes, who have been educated far beyond their capacity to undertake analytical thought.

... which seems perfectly true to me though a little dismissive as a general statement. I've not been educated to any level comparative to a lot of hallowed humanities celebrities but I can put together a few logical facts to get a picture of the world and also to get an idea of its size. This is an old theme of mine but so much disagreement is to do with the perception amongst a great deal of people that the world is distorted in favour of their own local experience like our field of vision is only sharp in a tiny part of our retina in order not to overload the brain.

Back to the actual meaningful content of the book. We seem to be in proper zoological investigation mode at the moment with the snarky comments at a minimum and proper reference to experiment and fossil evidence. The current chapter is to do with so-called missing links, a phrase which has now been spun into "gaps in the fossil record". Dawkins states that Evolution could be disproved by a single fossil of a classification at odds with the rock layer in which it is found and that this has never occurred. This seems like a challenge issued in extreme belligerence. He also says that we should surprised that we actually have so many fossils to demonstrate the progression of changes over geological time and that we do not need what he likens to video evidence to back up the forensic evidence of experiment and intellectual progress in describing evolution. We should not get hung-up about the lack of links.

...

Delay for some anger-dispersion after stumbling accidentally on this.

And finally if your phone is equipped to handle more complex ring tones than the soundtrack to pong, you might like to consider this.