lamont
Contributor
Debay777:
Basically geneticists have bridged the gaps. You need to get off the internet and spend 4+ years in college learning about it, though, if you really want to be convinced.
(And I'm not talking about gene splicing, I'm talking about sequencing organisms and doing genetic taxonomy to begin with).
Nobody has ever seen the center of a black hole singularity either, or even a Schwartzchild event horizon. I definitely believe in a Schwartzchild event horizon, however, because we can see the gas clouds swirling around it and the energy released from infalling particles.
Similarly, we can see Evolution occuring on fast timeframes with viruses like HIV, we can use Genetics to explain relationships between organisms (in fact old taxonomical models were overthrow by the use of Genetics rather than describing physical features of animals). It also explains the fossil record to the extent which is possible.
What you want is certain proof and science cannot and never can give certain proof. I can't prove that Einstein's theory of gravity is Precisely True because there are always areas of uncertainty -- the center of a black hole is definitely one of them. I'm pretty sure that if you jump off a building that you'll hurt yourself though... We accept all kinds of scientific theories even though every prediction that they could make sometimes isn't experimentally verifiable. You can experimentally prove that a scientific theory is wrong, but you can never proove it is True (although you can increase the regime over which is believed to be true and add experimental confirmation). In fact the one feature of scientific theories which separate them from other theories is that you must have experiments that can be done on them to prove that they are False.
With Evolution if you came up with a timeframe for the life that we see to evolve which exceeded the age of the Earth or the Universe then Evolution would be completely falsified, for example. Nobody has ever come up with such evidence. The best anyone has come up with is the "Cambrian Explosion" issue which takes a poorly understood feature of the geological record and claims that since we can't currently explain it that it must be due to God, which is not the same thing as falsifying Evolution.
Nobody has made those claims in this thread, I would never make claims like that, and you seem to be constructing a Straw Man argument that you can tear down like you're proving something. That's not even addressing weither or not you've got your fact straight, but they're just irrelevant.
Mostly you only see the successful species which multiply and are fruitful and tend to be left in the fossil record. The fossil record preserves the tiniest fraction of all the organisms which have ever existed.
Read The Blind Watchmaker for a book-length rebuttal.
I also took more than a few physics courses in high school. The first law of thermodynamics merely states that entropy always increases. However it actually takes some entropy to allow for highly structured complex systems (low energy systems like crystals are actually highly strctured). Highly entropy systems may have low degrees of organization and informational content (like random gas molecules) or high degrees of organization and informational content (like life on earth). Similarly, a sequence of random numbers 'looks' stastically just like a number like Chaitin's Omega which is packed with information. If you do some reading on information theory's application to thermodynamics you should see how this idea about thermodynamics and evolution is wrong.
The blind watchmaker theory, or arguments about 747s being assembled by a tornado and "tossing jigsaw pieces into the air" are all based on a fundamental misunderstanding about Evolution. Evolution is a combination of random mutation and natural selection. Mutation is random and is like tossing things into the air. But it has had billions of years to operate, and over the course of billions of years and the massive number of different instances of organisms that Evolution has to work with (all of them are die rolls in the evolutionary craps game) you expect to get dealt a few statistically unlikely hands. Mutation is also backed up with my natural selection which directs the randomness due a fitness function which is simply survival. The general picture of evolution is therefore not unlike a computer neural network where mutations off a given instance tend to search out and find local areas of high fitness through randomly walking their neighborhood.
When did condescention become a Christian Value? Point me to the point in the scriptures where Jesus said "go thou and be condescending towards others"?
