Only With Evidence Poem by gershon hepner

ONLY WITH EVIDENCE


How do we know the sun’s a ball of fire
and that the earth goes rounds the sun?
Only with evidence. If you inquire,
you’ll find it, and you’ll have begun––
relying not on what is taught and learned
but on the facts’ finality––
to find they speak and therefore can’t be spurned,
reacting with reality.

Inspired by an article on Richard Dawkins’s new book, “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution, ” reviewed by Susan Salter Reynolds in the LA Times on October 11,2009:
Richard Dawkins, best known as the author of 'The Selfish Gene' (1976) and 'The God Delusion' (2006) , is at the Atheist Alliance International Convention in Burbank to discuss his new book, 'The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution' (Free Press: 470 pp., $30) , but he can't get from one banquet hall to the next without someone asking to take a picture with him. Modest and professorial, Dawkins is mobbed, celebrity-style, no matter which audience he tells there is no God. As for Mother Nature, he adds, she doesn't care either - natural selection is not a good-natured process, but one that favors mutant efforts to get ahead. The evidence for evolution, he concludes, is irrefutable; all living things evolved from a common ancestor, so grow up and stop whining. There is no master plan. We (our genes, that is) are on our own. No wonder the creationists want to kill the messenger. Dawkins has been accused of aggression, militancy, arch-adaptationism and even - don't say it - reductionism. His critics hurl themselves against him in article after debate after full-length book, peppering him with questions: What about the gaps in the fossil record? How about the possibility of an intelligent designer? Would you believe the Earth is only 10,000 years old? ...
Dear Juliet, ' this new book begins. 'Now that you are ten, I want to write to you about something that is important to me. Have you ever wondered how we know the things that we know? How do we know, for instance, that the stars, which look like tiny pinpricks in the sky, are really huge balls of fire like the sun and are really far away? And how do we know that Earth is a smaller ball whirling round one of those stars, the sun? The answer to these questions is 'evidence.' '

10/11/09