A test of your common sense

Hi Buz,I think you've actually stumbled upon perhaps the most important point of the thread. Indeed true, and this is exactly what Taz intended to display. Yet here you illustrate a far more important fact: people tend to incorrectly classify certain topics as comprehensible through normal, common sense. This is an extension, I believe, of the tendency of human beings to believe themselves to be far more competent in subjects they are ignorant of (specifically, if you know just a little about a topic, you are more likely to believe yourself to be extremely competent in the subject matter, even though an actual test of your knowledge would prove distinctly otherwise).You believe yourself, through "common sense," to have identified a major contraindication of what you would likely term a "materialistic worldview." You are certain that chaos will never spontaneously form into order, regardless of the amount of time or the circumstances, and you hold this to be proof positive of the falsity of evolution, modern cosmology, etc.Yet you are neither a physicist nor a chemist, and your education in those areas is negligible. That's not an insult - not everyone is or needs to be an expert in those fields. But you're making claims based on ignorance, and for the rest of us, it shows.The word "crystals" has been thrown at you repeatedly, every time you make this claim, because crystals (some of them, at least) are the easiest and most obvious example of what you believe to be impossible.A snowflake in particular is a thing of beauty and impeccable order. Yet it is not guided by any intelligence as it forms, and it requires no input of energy. A snowflake forms spontaneously from a fluid, chaos shifting into order all on its own. Exactly what you say cannot and does not happen, ever, happens billions or trillions of times in a single snowstorm.Your "common sense" is wrong, Buz. "Common sense" usually is, because the knowledge upon which that sense is based is limited to what we individually know to be true...and that knowledge is often based on inaccuracies or even outright falsehoods. Just as you can reach a false conclusion through solid logic if your premise is incorrect, "common sense" only works when the knowledge it's based on is at all accurate.In this case, once again you demonstrate that many people will reach utterly inaccurate "common sense" conclusions because their knowledge on a given topic is flawed or utterly absent. This is so ubiquitous that I would suggest that "common sense" is a shortened form of "I'm not at all knowledgeable in this subject, but this is my best guess." And for some strange reason, people place confidence in "common sense" solutions. It would be funny, if it weren't so frequently disastrous.

The overestimation of self-competence is a human trait, not simply a Creationist one. It's a big part of why tests are used in schools and other professional training programs - without an objective test to measure one's own competence in a subject, people will tend to think themselves much more competent than they actually are.And for some reason we culturally prefer to give an answer, even when based upon ignorance, other than a truthful and shameless "I don't know." The best "common sense" answer provided in the thread was "I don't really know, I'd ask an engineer."