another idea about the thing

Just when you thought everything was settled, along comes this.

Much better than one of the alternative theories I favored when the Bibliothumparians proposed to add  Unintelligible Design to the local science curriculum (since, after all, evolution, like gravitation, is just a theory).

Speaking from the audience in an auditorium reeking with gleeful anticipation of the End of Daze, I suggested that there should be many alternatives to which students should be exposed since, Praise Bob,  we all believe in free markets . . . and the free market of ideas counts as one of them.

And with that introduction, I suggested the Theory of Transportation, which was premised on the the idea that the universe had been delivered to the wrong address as a result of a cosmic bookkeeping error and had, further, been damaged en route.

Another audience member (I later found out that he was a flak for Popeil Products) suggested the inclusion of Silly String Theory in the physics curriculum – and then spent fifteen minutes deriding the Theory of Transportation using one of Zeno’s Paradoxes to demonstrate that transportation was impossible.

But becoming a Pastafarian certainly has great appeal – especially around dinner time.

So, may His Noodly Appendage touch you soon.

Ramen!

not ideas about the thing, but the thing itself

Modern reality is a reality of decreation, in which our revelations are not the revelations of belief, but the precious portents of our own powers. The greatest truth we could hope to discover, in whatever field we discovered it, is that man’s truth is the final resolution of everything.

– Wallace Stevens (from the essay “The Relations Between Poetry and Art” included in the collection published as The Necessary Angel)

As if to add insult to injury (again), science has now bitch-slapped the notion of “faith” by demonstrating (in ways that will, no doubt, be challenged by theoloons of every persuasion) that there’s absolutely no objective difference between knowledge of the reality of gravitation and belief in the possibility of miracles.

This explains a lot.

Unfortunately, the people who will benefit most from a working knowledge of the information will be the first to reject its factual validity.

They know better, after all.