Posted by Gremlin [12.255.181.7 - 12-255-181-7.client.attbi.com] on 13 July 2002 at 18.59.46 ZuluTime:

In Reply to: kudos to you posted by Andy on 13 July 2002 at 07.07.58 ZuluTime:

Here's the basic flowchart, if you want to see it in advance:

     1) Show a deity to have ever existed
     2) Show that said deity still exists
     3) Show that said deity expects to be worshipped
     4) Show that said deity is worthy of my attention

That's a bit simplified, but you get the idea. Obviously, if a deity can be shown to exist today, we can skip the first step and save a lot of time. But I'll give you a good parallel example.
     Once upon a time, Chuck Marsh [a palaeontologist who caused a lot of problems for real palaeontolgists in the nineteenth century] found an animal called Apatosaurus excelsus. Later, the same animal was discovered elsewhere, and without a skull; however, the skull of a Camarasaurus lentis was found twenty miles away. Apparently deciding that the skull had rolled that far, and in a rush to find the largest number of different genera, Marsh jammed the camarasaur's skull onto the apatosaur's head and called it Brontosaurus ajax.
     No one questioned that for decades.
     Late in the twentieth century, people at Chicago's Field Museum finally began to question it. It turned out that this brontosaurus was just another apatosaur.
     Now--this week--a few people are starting to think that the 'brontosaur' is different enough from the other apatosaurs to be its own genus, which they want to label as Brontosaurus again.
     If they can show that the animal is really different enough--based largely on its age--then the brontosaurs return.
     Personally, I'm doubting they'll do it. In the 1980s, Greg Paul [a far better palaeontologist than Marsh ever was] suggested that the animals Deinonychus antirrhopus and Saurornitholestes langstoni were similar enough to Velociraptor mongoliensis to be considered Velociraptor antirrhopus and Velociraptor langstoni: because they were different sizes from different parts of the world at different times, but were still pretty similar. They were, of course, all dromaeosaurids--the family containing all three genera, as well as Dromaeosaurus albertensis and the newer Utahraptor ostromaysorum/oweni [no one can decide on uthraptor's type species yet]. But Paul wanted them to be the same genus.
     In the case of both the velociraptor and the brontosaur, there's been insuficient evidence, to date, to allow these things to be reclassified in the taxonomy. Until or unless sufficient evidence arises, I--and the scientific world in general--can't acknowledge these claims.
     Show me that brontosaurs are their own genera, that Deinonychus was a velo, or that deities exist, and I'll change my mind. Until then, it's unfounded and immaterial.