[dighton]

"As I read this, I kept thinking: 'How hard can it be to prove that this paper is incontrovertibly wrong?'" he said. "But it is hard. Not because his ideas are right. They're not. But because he's created a self-consistent system of arguments."

Great post.

Chesterton says it all about arguing with madmen, but the passage eludes me. Anyone?

[Dog Gone]

I wish I had saved all the letters I've received over the years which promised to help me find oil through the use of divining rods. "Underground rivers of oil", they claim.

I should have put them under glass next to all the patents I've stolen from widows. You know, the ones for the 200 mpg carburetor.

[aculeus]

Can't help with Chesterton, but ...

Me: My name right now is legally Archimedes Plutonium, and I had changed it several times in my life.

PM: Archimedes Plutonium, four days a week he washes pots and pans at Dartmouth's Hanover Inn. For his 32 hours in the suds, Archimedes gets a precious employ benefit, time on the schools computers where he serves the Net and puts out the word on his singular passion, a theory called PLutonium Atom Totality.

Me: Everything that we see, everything that there is, is just one atom! If you know about physics, every electron is a whole bunch of dots, those dots I claim are galaxies. So as you are looking at the night sky, you are looking at one electron.

So, now you know.

Archy's link.

[Orual]

Chesterton said about arguing with a madman, "his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle".

Also from Orthodoxy.:

"THE Christian admits that the universe is manifold and even miscellaneous, just as a sane man knows that he is complex. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman. But the Materialist's world is quite simple and solid, just as the madman is quite sure he is sane. The Materialist is sure that history has been simply and solely a chain of causation, just as the interesting person before mentioned is quite sure that he is simply and solely a chicken. Materialists and madmen never have doubts."