Wow, I don’t know how I forgot that part! as soon as I read your comment, the image that I carried around in my mind for at least a decade was back in full HD of a giant finger pressing through a whale-with-the-skin-of-a-slightly-off-cucumber and making a hole. I don’t know how I had managed to finally block that out.
And somehow that image was also enough coaching for my google-fu…
Ted Hughes’ How the Whale Became: And Other Stories (google books entry queued up)
Yup. Science not knowing everything != Science doesn’t know anything.
The god of the gaps is a weak and pathetic god anyway. It can only get small and less relevant over time.
Excellent catch 
Just so. If you take something on faith without thinking about it then you don’t understand it. On our long drive from San Francisco to Oregon a few days ago my family and I were listening to E O Wilson’s book The Social Conquest of Earth, stopping it every 10 minutes to discuss and argue about it. I’m certain Wilson has no problem with that!
“Well, I don’t really think that the end can be assessed as of itself as being the end because what does the end feel like? It’s like saying when you try to extrapolate the end of the universe, you say, if the universe is indeed infinite, then how - what does that mean? How far is all the way, and then if it stops, what’s stopping it, and what’s behind what’s stopping it? So, what’s the end, you know, is my question to you.” - David St. Hubbins
You should totally write that parable!
… although I’m not sure what the lesson there is supposed to be? … not that it matters 
Yeah, man, have you ever really, I mean really looked at your hands, man?
To paraphrase the late, great Douglas Adams, this behaviour can be explained by three factors:
If Douglas Adams were still around to be corrected, I’d tell him that 3 is stubbornness.
You’re forgetting that evolution among predator and prey is an arms race. As snow evolves to avoid falling on driveways and roads, driveways and roads evolve snow-catching adaptations.
"The Berenstein Bears universe is under no obligation to make sense to you.”
― Neil deGrizz Tyson
If that eye-pleasing scenery can’t possibly be an accident, the existence of your scenery-creating deity can’t possibly be an accident either. So…who created your deity, and who created that creator, and on and on…?
Not since my multidimensional machine ran out of Berensteinium. I can’t go there anymore.
(used to go there a lot just to ask why they always wore the same clothes, yet mama bear always seemed to be patching different clothes and hanging clothes on a clothesline that they never wore… Ah, the mysteries of alternate universes!)
It pays to be careful here. It may be like a sphere in the sense of begin both compact and boundary-less. It may be unbounded. Both of those could happen with varying topologies. Regardless, the diameter of the universe is larger than that of the observable universe so there is no way to tell the difference between the two.
There is a fascinating science of collecting whale poop to learn about whales and what they eat. Of course, the Japanese prefer to kill the whales to do the same thing.
Ted Hughes, apart from what happened to Sylvia Plath, was no Rudyard Kipling. The Just So Stories are a work of genius. Ted Hughes, not so much.
My favourite is The Crab that Played with the Sea.
And nothing to do with any very expensive culinary byproducts. Not at all.
I have been going with the toroidal universe for a while, still, what is behind the wall??
What was that about “good jazz”?
No idea.
(Hits play on the CD player with Jimmy Smith’s Christmas Cookin’ in it and relaxes on the couch.)
meh - we can just ask Lex Luthor
