Evolution And Its Discontents

 

Thomas Huxley, Known As Darwin's Bulldog

A Lady said that Evolution was a scientific theory - just as the Gipper, better known as Ronald Reagan said - and she agreed: just a theory.
She then asked me if I believed in Evolution.

I answered that although the science of living things seems to be the correct arena in which to have beliefs or disbeliefs, I had none: I neither believed nor disbelieved.

Interestingly enough, she disbelieved my seriousness. It was her "belief" that I was somehow "pulling her leg".

However, I have no rods on the anvil nor any ferric materials in the fire. Evolution is an old friend - I recall reading about Darwin, Huxley, Leake, and Bishop Usher when I was in grade school. Yet I have no reason to establish a full-blown "Belief System" (or, "BS" as it is abbreviated) about the whole thing.

Were I in research, now, that is a different case. Were I researching, say, worms and amoebae or lichens or some ratty little mammals that I had to chivvy from their burrows and rush to the laboratory mazes, I would probably need to have a BS.
Or if I had to, say, bet money on some future life issue, like "should I move to an island nation if climate change is true, and the ocean levels will rise 20 feet over the next trimester of the CO2 cycle?", then I would probably have to swat, study, and set up a proper BS.

Otherwise, no. The Belief System is potentially in me (as Aristotle would say), but it is not everywhere present in force at all times.

I then told her that God and the Holy were not properly "beliefs" at any time or place. I left her in a state of disheveled disbelief. She said hotly that I acted as a capricious and arbitrary cad.
I said "Arbiter, Non Modo Arbitrario"
("An Arbiter ... referee, judge, moderator; any good-type of notion that deals with placid reason and virtue... but not Arbitrarily!")
At which point She-who-must-be-obeyed, who had sat silently during this vaudeville of belief,  took straight aim at my shins under the table and delivered a stealth kick of 20 megatons! Later she said she would have kicked the other lady, if she had had a clear shot.

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