Evidence for the Dark One: the taint on Saidin, historical records of the Age of Legends (a lot has been lost, but there must be something, otherwise how would they even know stuff like who Lews Therin was?) Darkspawn like Trollocs and Myrdraal, and the spreading Blight.
The taint on saidin is the only thing there that demands divine interference, as best I can tell. The weirder Darkspawn are clearly supernatural, but they’re not supernatural in a way that demands a god when you’ve already got magic, and their own opinions could be explained as religious differences. The Blight’s harder to explain, since receding suddenly by miles when a bunch of Darkspawn get killed is kind of a giveaway, but that could be coincidence or a nonsapient link between them and it; with Fisher King symbology all over the place the latter’s not too far-fetched. And since the Dark One seems to have almost exclusively acted through mortal agents during the Age of Legends, those events don’t bear any obvious fingerprints of the divine either. All told, I think I’d still assign some probability mass to the theory that most of this Shai’Tan business is just something that one side or the other of a semi-legendary conflict ginned up as a psychological warfare tactic.
Evidence for the Pattern seems to be stronger, though, especially since the magical Pattern-based protagonist powers that the leads get seem to be a well-known and quantifiable phenomenon in this setting. Not to mention the divination abilities that some people get.
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.
The taint on saidin is the only thing there that demands divine interference, as best I can tell. The weirder Darkspawn are clearly supernatural, but they’re not supernatural in a way that demands a god when you’ve already got magic, and their own opinions could be explained as religious differences. The Blight’s harder to explain, since receding suddenly by miles when a bunch of Darkspawn get killed is kind of a giveaway, but that could be coincidence or a nonsapient link between them and it; with Fisher King symbology all over the place the latter’s not too far-fetched. And since the Dark One seems to have almost exclusively acted through mortal agents during the Age of Legends, those events don’t bear any obvious fingerprints of the divine either. All told, I think I’d still assign some probability mass to the theory that most of this Shai’Tan business is just something that one side or the other of a semi-legendary conflict ginned up as a psychological warfare tactic.
Evidence for the Pattern seems to be stronger, though, especially since the magical Pattern-based protagonist powers that the leads get seem to be a well-known and quantifiable phenomenon in this setting. Not to mention the divination abilities that some people get.
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.