The Spandrels Of San Marco And The

Great Theories Are Expansive; Failures Mire Us In Dogmatism And Tunnel Vision.

The Argument That The Literal Story Of Genesis Can Qualify As Science Collapses On Three Major Grounds: The Creationists' Need To Invoke Miracles In Order To Compress The Events Of The Earth's History Into The Biblical Span Of A Few Thousand Years; Their Unwillingness To Abandon Claims Clearly Disproved, Including The Assertion That All Fossils Are Products Of Noah's Flood; And Their Reliance Upon Distortion, Misquote, Half-quote, And Citation Out Of Context To Characterize The Ideas Of Their Opponents.

The Myriad Valleys Could Have Arisen Anywhere On The Landscape. The Current Positions Are Quite Accidental. If We Could Repeat The Experiment, We Might Obtain No Valleys At All, Or A Completely Different System. Yet We Now Stand At The Shore Line Contemplating The Fine Spacing Of Valleys And Their Even Contact With The Sea. How Easy It Is To Be Misled And To Assume That No Other Landscape Could Possibly Have Arisen.

Any Human Being Is Really Good At Certain Things. The Problem Is That The Things You're Good At Come Naturally. And Since Most People Are Pretty Modest Instead Of An Arrogant S.o.b. Like Me, What Comes Naturally, You Don't See As A Special Skill. It's Just You. It's What You've Always Done.

I Strongly Reject Any Conceptual Scheme That Places Our Options On A Line, And Holds That The Only Alternative To A Pair Of Extreme Positions Lies Somewhere Between Them. More Fruitful Perspectives Often Require That We Step Off The Line To A Site Outside The Dichotomy.