Sorry I'm late with this but......T-Rod asked me to post this when there was a discussion involving God, religion, and I'm assuming any other topic that is pointless arguing.

Soooooooooooo

This is just because

A parable.

Once upon a time, there was a card game known as "poker." People played this game for money. It was looked upon as a fun way to gamble, to spend some time with friends. Nothing more.

A few players, mysteriously, seemed to win consistently. Over time, they won more and more. People wondered where this consistent winning ability came from, and whether it could be duplicated. They studied the game, in depth. Eventually a new form of the game called "online poker" came to be. People could now play dozens of times more hands over the course of their lifetime than it was ever possible to play before. They could track the different hands they had, their winrates, the plays that won money, the plays that lost money. Computers made it possible for anyone to quickly and easily analyze the chance of one hand winning against another when all the money went in. New concepts came into play. Even mediocre players understood concepts like "domination" and "putting the opponent on a range not a hand" and "the goal is to make your opponent play as differently as possible from how he would play if he could see your hand." Entire books called "The Theory of Poker" were written, studied, debated. Forums sprung up in which people debated, at length, the specific way to play specific hands, and why. Some people spoke of someday "solving" poker, being able to play perfectly. People dedicated their lives to the study of poker.

Then one day, a guy from a church wrote a book called "Intelligent Poker." This book insisted that all poker profits are created by God. This man had never played poker. He knew nothing about the theory of poker, or hand ranges, or anything else. He just knew, from reading certain passages in the Bible taken out of context, that poker profits do not come about the way that the "experts" say they do, but are created by God -- like everything else. He made it his mission to change the world, to make everybody believe that poker profits are created by God. Poker, he wrote, is "irreducibly complex," and humans will never be able to fully understand it.

To gain his end, he began to use several rhetorical strategies against the old understanding of poker. He argued that Sklanskian theories of poker [sorry, had to pick somebody to be Darwin] lead to atheism, violence, and (somehow) both fascism and communism. He pointed out that nobody had ever actually "solved" poker. He showed that there are holes in the theory of poker. He pointed out that in any case, the book is called the "Theory of Poker," not the "Fact of Poker." He noted that experts still disagree about many facets of the best way to play poker, both in general and in specific hands, and (somehow!) concluded that this means that the entire theoretical basis of poker itself is shaky. He argued that nothing so beautiful and complex as David Negreanu's lifetime winrate could possibly come from a set of random processes.

And then he decided that poker education in this country is hopelessly biased against "Intelligent Poker." He lobbied nationwide to get his theories of poker taught in the schools, and to insist that all poker books written henceforth, and all poker forums, and everywhere else that poker is taught and learned, include "Intelligent Poker" as an "alternative" to the regular theory of poker. "Teach the conflicts!" he insisted.

Other people took up the crusade. Again, none of them ever played a hand of poker. None of them could tell you whether a flush beats a straight. Their theory made no predictions, and could not help you play poker, or understand anything of the intricacies of the game. But these people knew the truth of poker, because it was laid out so clearly in the Bible. They started a foundation to promote their ideas and called it the "Poker Discovery Institute."

When the real poker players of the world rebelled against this, the "Poker Discovery Institute" took it as proof that there is a conspiracy throughout the ranks of poker players to stop the truth. Every time a real poker player attacked Intelligent Poker theory, it only showed how irrational, biased and unwilling to open their eyes the "Sklanskian poker theorists" were. "Why are they so scared of us? There must be something true about what we're saying" was the consensus.

People who knew nothing about poker began to believe in Intelligent Poker theory. All the real poker experts, and anyone who had ever thought about poker seriously, fought against it, but to no avail. Someone finally made a movie called "Expelled: No Thinking Allowed," starring Ben Stein, that convinced millions more people who knew nothing about poker that the so-called "Sklanskians" were closed-minded people bent on quashing this new controversy because they couldn't handle any dissension from orthodoxy.