Even the taint on saidin doesn’t strictly demand divine interference. The fate of Shadar Logoth demonstrates that man-made supernatural corruption can also occur, and the events of the ninth book even indicate that gur zntavghqr bs gur gnvag ba Funqne Ybtbgu vf rdhny gb gur gnvag ba fnvqva, fvapr gurl obgu ryvzvangr rnpu bgure. So it’s not vanishingly unlikely that humans could have tainted saidin themselves. The Blight and the Darkspawn are physical corroboration of the narrative that involves conflict with the Dark One though, as is the taint on saidin.
If anyone who’s not a Darkspawn or one of the Forsaken has actually been to Shayol Ghul and made it back to tell about it, that would provide additional evidence, but as far as I can tell the only reason anyone on the light side knows it exists is because the legends say so, and maybe because trollocs and myrdraal have attested to it on some of the rare occasions when people actually talk to them.
Glad to see the responses, keep’em coming if you have’em.
Regarding the DO: in-game, my character has raided Thakan’dar itself. And when you try to channel there, the Dark One smites you with lightning. Which I’ve lived through. And being a channeler, I can claim having felt the nearness of the Bore. So I expect to have the least trouble with that one.
The Creator is a bigger puzzle. He doesn’t seem to do anything...
I suppose an alternative is asking your students to ponder the question of what evidence there is for the Creator, and leave open the possibility of being Creator-agnostic. Clearly in a world like the WOT-verse, the prior for a supernatural creator deity is much higher, given that there’s a pretty well established supernatural anticreator deity, so there’s not much call to be an a-Creatorist, but even if we know from authorial say-so that the Creator exists, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with acknowledging from a character perspective that there isn’t enough data to be confident.
Even the taint on saidin doesn’t strictly demand divine interference. The fate of Shadar Logoth demonstrates that man-made supernatural corruption can also occur, and the events of the ninth book even indicate that gur zntavghqr bs gur gnvag ba Funqne Ybtbgu vf rdhny gb gur gnvag ba fnvqva, fvapr gurl obgu ryvzvangr rnpu bgure. So it’s not vanishingly unlikely that humans could have tainted saidin themselves. The Blight and the Darkspawn are physical corroboration of the narrative that involves conflict with the Dark One though, as is the taint on saidin.
If anyone who’s not a Darkspawn or one of the Forsaken has actually been to Shayol Ghul and made it back to tell about it, that would provide additional evidence, but as far as I can tell the only reason anyone on the light side knows it exists is because the legends say so, and maybe because trollocs and myrdraal have attested to it on some of the rare occasions when people actually talk to them.
Glad to see the responses, keep’em coming if you have’em.
Regarding the DO: in-game, my character has raided Thakan’dar itself. And when you try to channel there, the Dark One smites you with lightning. Which I’ve lived through. And being a channeler, I can claim having felt the nearness of the Bore. So I expect to have the least trouble with that one.
The Creator is a bigger puzzle. He doesn’t seem to do anything...
I suppose an alternative is asking your students to ponder the question of what evidence there is for the Creator, and leave open the possibility of being Creator-agnostic. Clearly in a world like the WOT-verse, the prior for a supernatural creator deity is much higher, given that there’s a pretty well established supernatural anticreator deity, so there’s not much call to be an a-Creatorist, but even if we know from authorial say-so that the Creator exists, there’s not necessarily anything wrong with acknowledging from a character perspective that there isn’t enough data to be confident.