Wikipedia talk:Requests for arbitration/Ed Poor2

Source of the Conflict
One way to resolve the conflict between Bah and Uncle Ed would be to deal with the surface manifestations: that there is a lot of fighting and reverting and innuendo. But if we could get to the root cause, that would be much better. If we could agree on what role Evolution is to play in our encyclopedia, I think Bah and Uncle Ed could become fast friends. That may sound optimistic, but humor me while I suggest something "outside of the box."

Bah obviously feels frustrated that he has to keep fighting for the inclusion of something that has been proven via the scientific method. In essence, Bah considers Evolution to be true, and therefore, an unquestionable part of everyone's reality and the definitions of words.

Plato says, on the contrary, that reality is based on three necessary components: truth, beauty, and goodness. Without the constructs of beauty and goodness, we loose all meaning of what it is to be human or even a thinking being. Trees for instance, are alive, but they react only to truth. A tree has no ability to create an objective reality from the subjective constructs of beauty and goodness. An encyclopedia for a tree would be one based solely on scientific truth (except that a tree couldn't understand the words, of course, because words are constructs).

The quantification of truth via the scientific method is not enough to base a human existence upon. It is a generally accepted notion in the scientific community that less than 10% of the reality we base our implementation upon is scientific fact. The rest of it is what we feel is good for society and the beauty of general consensus. If Bah could agree that Evolution is a small part of society's reality, and hence a small consideration in describing that reality via Wikipedia, and Uncle Ed could agree that the scientific method has overwhelmingly proven certain factual elements of Evolution while maintaining that these facts are not everything, we could edit in harmony. --Zephram Stark 15:42, 6 October 2005 (UTC)