[muerteverde]

"What about darkness, professor. Is there such a thing as darkness?"

"Yes," the professor replies without hesitation. "What is night if it isn't darkness?"

"You're wrong again, sir. Darkness is not something; it is the absence of something. You can have low light, normal light, bright light, flashing light, but if you have no light constantly you have nothing and it's called darkness, isn't it? That's the meaning we use to define the word."

"In reality, darkness isn't. If it were, you would be able to make darkness darker, wouldn't you?"

Darkness is a parallel example. Yes it is the absense of light, but that doesn't mean there are not degrees of darkness. The degrees of darkness operate in the same manner as degrees of light. If I turn on a second light now, I have less darkness. This does not mean we cannot have an absolute darkness. The student is just playing word games here.

"Yes, professor. My point is, your philosophical premise is flawed to start with, and so your conclusion must also be flawed."

"You are working on the premise of duality," the student explains. "You argue that there is life and then there's death; a good God and a bad God. You are viewing the concept of God as something finite, something we can measure. Sir, science can't even explain a thought."

The student also operates withing a system of duality. The professor is not neceearily wrong to do so however. If we have two samples, one at 10 degrees and the other at 100 degress, one is hotter and one is colder. This is a perfectly valid duality and we use this all the time. Now we can introduce a third sample at 0 degrees and a fourth at 200 degrees. Does this make thew first two samples no longer hot and cold? No. In relation to each other (subjective measurement) they are still hot and cold but now we need more precision to describe all the samples. But wait... that is why we have degrees! So we don't just say "hot" or "cold" we give a unit that tells how much energy. A scientist would not simple write down "hot" in an experiment, as this would be a useless duality. He would write 0.0 degrees Celsius.

Duality does not require that we measure. I like icecream more than I like radishes but I cannot measure this duality. Also, nothing that the professor said earlier implies a measurement. He was asking for value judgments on whether something was good or bad, a job which theists usually take up with glee. Now what makes the student say we cannot have a good god and a bad god? Is that his starting premise? Almost, but his starting premise, as we will soon see is actually only that we cannot have a bad god because he will define evil as the absence of God rather than the absence of good (the most serious flaw in the argument, IMO).

"It uses electricity and magnetism, but has never seen, much less fully understood either one. To view death as the opposite of life is to be ignorant of the fact that death cannot exist as a substantive thing. Death is not the opposite of life, just the absence of it."

Seen electricity or magnetism? Science is a lot more than just seeing. We conduct experiements and see the results of magnetic attraction if that is what he wants. Through a long series of experiments we develop theoretic frameworks of predictions. This is how we come to understand the world we live in. Touch a pan and get burned. You didn't see the heat but you experienced it nonetheless and can understand that touching it again will burn you again, so we know that it is probably there and live with that assumption (not faith).

Death is the absence of life? So are rocks dead because they are devoid of life? No. Death is neither the absence of life nor its opposite. The student loses at his or her own word games. Death is the state of being after a living organism has ceased its life functions.

"Now tell me, professor. Do you teach your students that they evolved from a monkey?"

No professor of science anywhere teaches that. This shows us the entire conversation is fiction. Pathetic strawman too.

"Have you ever observed evolution with your own eyes, sir?"

"Since no one has ever observed the process of evolution at work and cannot even prove that this process is an on-going endeavor, are you not teaching your opinion, sir? Are you now not a scientist, but a preacher?"

The student looks around the room. "Is there anyone in the class who has ever seen the professor's brain?" The class breaks out into laughter.

"Is there anyone here who has ever heard the professor's brain, felt the professor's brain, touched or smelt the professor's brain? No one appears to have done so. So, according to the established rules of empirical, stable, demonstrable protocol, science says that you have no brain, with all due respect, sir."

That is not how science works. That is not how we live our lives either. I have never been to China and seen it with my own eyes but I do not assume it is nonexistent. There is plenty of evidence beyond what we see with our eyes. In the case of evolution there are fossiles, DNA, geology, experiments with fast breeding animals, and a multitude of other strong evidences. In the case of the professor, the fact that every person needs a brain to function (induction), and the behavior exibited by the professor that indicates the use of a brain. Yes, even the fictional student has a brain, he just isn't using it properly.

Finally, after what seems an eternity, the old man answers. "I guess you'll have to take them on faith."

No we don't. I don't need to have faith that the sun will rise tomorrow, but I assume it does just from my repeated observations and my theoretical understanding of the Earth's orbit.

To this the student replied, "Evil does not exist sir, or at least it does not exist unto itself. Evil is simply the absence of God.

Here we have the big one. Evil is the absence of not good, but GOD! Where did that come from? Obviously he has already defined God as perfectly good, so he can just perform a simple substitution. But why define God as the perfect good? Faulty premise. We can poke holes at this argument by asking what "absolute evil" would be, as in the cases of absolute dark and absolute cold. Can such a thing exist in his world view? We can measure temperature and lumination, but can we measure goodness on a scale from absolute evil to God? What unit of measure do we use? What is the metric symbol for that unit? It is a ridiculous argument, especially when he tries to equate goodness with heat or light.

It is just like darkness and cold, a word that man has created to describe the absence of God. God did not create evil. Evil is the result of what happens when man does not have God's love present in his heart. It's like the cold that comes when there is no heat or the darkness that comes when there is no light."

No, we did not create the word "evil" to describe the absence of God. Provide evidence of this outrageous claim. Also support the claim that God did not create evil. If I place my soda can in the refrigerator, I am causing the soda to cool down. I have removed the heat from the can and essentially created cold there. If we follow this student's logic, we can still come to the conclusion that God createdevil simply by not being present (though we cannot accept that evil is the absence of God, but just for the sake or argument we will allow it now). The example that the professor gave about the cancer patient still holds true. When a human commits evil by innaction it is called "sin by omision". That same concept applies here.

This students statements are true, can you or can you not make night darker?
Is it possible for it to get colder after absolute zero -458 degree's F.
Can you feel, taste, see, hear, or smell your brain?

No, they are not true or logically sound. Yes, you can make night darker. Nights are darker when the moon is not full, when you are father from a city, and when there is cloud cover. What does getting colder than absolute zero have to do with this argument? Nonsequitor. I don't need to smell my own brain to know it is there. Oh, and I can feel it. It has weight and I feel that. It does not take faith to know I have a brain because I am using induction to assume that it is there, allowing me to think.