Now that's a useful and interesting comment. Thanks for engaging me as if I were an intelligent person, thereby allowing me to keep up the ruse in my head for a little longer. :)

I think it's completely fair to state that what I'm saying is not *likely*. I don't seriously believe elves are pulling people down, nor do I seriously believe the earth was created 6,000 years ago. I'm just not prepared to state that everything is known and it's settled. Very little, I think, is settled, and if we were to understand how things *really* worked our brains would explode. All of this kerfluffle is just us trying to make sense of what we see with our quite inadequate and puny five senses. A good start, a worthy goal, but who knows what other interesting stuff awaits. Thanks to scientists for trying to discover it, thanks to spiritualists for trying to make sense of it. :)

Going to have to agree to disagree on that. I'm pretty sure you were not here from the beginning. It's completely circumstantial.

And now I have productive things to do that don't involve arguing with people on slashdot.

Sure, who's to say it doesn't pop up every single nanosecond in the exact same state it was before. I wouldn't be able to tell the difference, so I don't really care. It's still in the realm of possibility, and trying to tell me that it's not happening just tells me that you don't have enough of an imagination. :)

Well, if it's not distinguishable from gravity, that's not the realm of science. Science says that stuff will fall at a measured rate. Until scientists have figured out the mechanism of gravity empirically (which is not settled yet) it may as well be a series of elves as warped space. Doesn't really matter, as long as it's predictable.

I think that the "god of the gaps" argument only shows that people were looking for it in a place where it was not to be found. That does not mean it doesn't exist. In case I haven't been clear, I am absolutely sure that God exists. I also think that God is not entropic, and looking for it in any place where entropy rules is a fool's errand.

Why should I not ignore the "intent of the writers"? They were, after all, ancient peoples who had a very different way of looking at the world than we do. That does not mean there is not some value in the allegory.

Science says nothing about the probability of a God. It is only concerned with what is testable. God is not testable (and I think deliberately so), so probabilities don't even have a bearing on the conversation.

Put another way, if God does not want to be seen in a specific context, it will not be seen - and that will appear as a low probability. Any God worth its salt would be able to show itself in a manner of its own choosing, when and how it feels appropriate. And it would seem that the realm of scientific discipline is one of those situations where it does not feel it appropriate. And frankly, were I in its place, I'd do the same thing.

Difference being - that's based on what you can see right now. You can test gravity, you can figure out what causes it, you can see the ball at the height of its parabola and measure its descent down into its lower energy state. You saw how the system began and ended, and thus you know for a fact that gravity did its thing. You don't know *why*, but you can measure it. That's not a nonzero chance. You never saw an elf.

You never saw the earth at the beginning. Thus, all you've got are guesses. Unless you can somehow build a time machine.

Technically, he is, to a degree, correct. The pressures at the center of the sun that cause initiation of fusion are caused by gravity. What we are seeing now is a balance between the outward pressures caused by fusion and the inward pressures caused by gravity. The reason supernovas are so violent is that the star runs out of fuel, the outward pressures get too high, and the whole thing just collapses in on itself very quickly.

That said, if he is denying that fusion is the process (or one of the major processes) that keeps the star from collapsing in on itself and creates the energy that causes the radiant heat we see, well, he's beyond hope.

Incorrect.

I have no doubts that based on the evidence that we see *now*, that evolution appears to be the correct way that life came to being. Scientifically, that's not within doubt. However, I do not treat the idea of evolution as a religion, because I am aware of one little fact that many people seem to overlook:

It's *all* circumstantial.

I realize this is fanciful, and the odds are really high that this didn't happen, but who is to say that six thousand years ago something didn't just pop everything into existence fully formed, *including* all of the evidence?

They're really high, but not nonzero.

I prefer to think that this did not happen, but I don't dismiss people who might think it did as complete crackpots. Very, very unlikely, improbable, perhaps even vanishing - but possible. Unless you were there from the beginning of the Universe and saw everything happen, there's no way to tell. All you've got, and will ever have, is a best guess. A probably correct one - but not certainly correct.