The reoccurring appearance of the “Cory Jones” picture on Facebook has become quite irritating, and its frequency leaves me with a rather uncomfortable feeling. It is an imperative I put an end to this once and for all, as it seems to be contaminating the minds of so many social networkers.

For those of you who have no idea what I am talking about, let me set the context before I continue.

As the story goes, a professor of a university is lecturing a class where he asks a student whether he believes in God or not. The professor at first seems to completely dismantle the student’s beliefs. He postulates that if God created everything, then he must have created evil, thus God must be evil. He further expounds upon this by providing the evidence of God’s creation of “hatred, ugliness, and sickness.”

The professor further states, “you have 5 senses, yet you cannot see God,” and that by empirical, testable and demonstrable protocol, science says your God does not exist.

Once the professor finishes his grilling, it’s the student’s turn to strike back. The student questions the professor as to the existence of “cold.” He states that there is no such thing that science can claim as “cold” nor can science claim some thing as “darkness.” The student explains that the former is merely an absence of “heat” while the latter is the absence of “light.”

Just as science cannot establish duality of opposites, so can it not establish the opposites of a “good” God and a “bad” God. The student further explains that “death is not the opposite of life: just the absence of it.” There is even a cute segment of this story that includes a quixotic claim against evolution: It is merely “opinion,” that since we cannot observe evolution, we must operate under mere “faith” that it is true. So, the explanations to life must therefore, at times, be reduced to “faith.”

Where do I start?

First and foremost, I must preface this with a quick correction for the author of this horrific parable of illogical silliness. In terms of the duality argument, “light” and “dark” are indeed not claimed to be necessary opposites. Light, in the context of science, is a noun, a natural phenomenon that we can observe. Dark, on the other hand, is an adjective, an explanation of the absence of light.

The same holds true for “heat.” Heat is a noun, a natural phenomenon, while “cold” is an adjective, an explanation.

To use this and attempt to usurp a life and death duality is definitely not a good start to arguing against science. Life and Death are absolute states of being, finite in nature. You are either alive, or you are dead. Whereas cold explains a degree of heat and darkness is a degree of light, life and death are absolute. While you can have degrees of life, such as lack of significant cognitive processes in retardation or states of cerebral vegetation, you cannot have degrees of death. Ignoring the idea of an afterlife, when your physical existence ceases to function, you have entered the absolute state of death.

Furthermore, the initial assertions of the professor are rather pigeonholed to begin with. Either that, or this professor is gravely misinterpreting science’s perspective of the divine. Science does not empirically or quantitatively claim God does not exist. Rather, science explains natural phenomenon in unbiased fashion. From the evidence that science gathers, tried and tested over time, it may claim that there is no reason to believe God exists.

Though, the “answers” to life’s most pressing questions could coalesce through the scientific endeavors undertaken by the geniuses running the massive particle accelerators at CERN and FermiLab, the pinnacle of human technology.

Now, the student’s claim against evolution is ingratiatingly obtuse and rather adorable by intellectual standards. The fact that you cannot observe evolutionary processes happening before your eyes does not mean that it doesn’t exist. But, if I must satisfy the “evolution before our eyes” conjecture, then I suppose I can provide an example.

For example (apologies for the redundancy), Hudson River fish are slowly becoming immune to toxic waste. Atlantic tomcod have evolved, most specifically in response to General Electric’s dumping of 1.3 million pounds of PCBs, within just 20 to 50 generations of fish. That is incredible speed in terms of evolutionary standards, and it has helped the fish become immune to the poison in their water.

It hardly requires mere “faith” to know this. Science does not call for “faith”; it calls for evidence. The professor in this situation would never say “I guess you’ll have to take them on faith.” The professor’s brain, although not inherently observable, is there; because by scientific standards, he would not be able to cognitively function much less formulate coherent sentences. The postulation is satisfied by biological fact.

Leave faith to religion, and leave the evidence to science.

Oh, and by the way, Einstein was not the student in this story, as some have claimed. Einstein was agnostic at the very least, and he wouldn’t be stupid enough to regress to such paltry logic.