rixtar wrote:
You say Science is not 100% and you are correct however you claim religion (Pick one I dont care) is incorrect. The only way that you can come to this conclusion is for you (I dont understand why you think I mean science, I meant you) believe 100% in evolution.
That's the fundamental difference between scientific thought and religious thought.
In religious thought something is either correct or incorrect, always 100%. We don't *think* that Jesus saves. We *know* he does. We don't *think* that God is omnipotent. We *know* he is. There is no room for uncertainty. That is, afterall, the nature of faith.
Scientific thought assumes that we are imperfect beings and can never know anything with 100% certainty. Thefore, the best we can do is come up with the "most likely", or "most correct" explations.
Science does not have to "prove" that creation is incorrect. It just has to determine that something else is more likely to be correct.
It's exactly the same as my dinner on the floor example. At no time did I prove that a divine force didn't put my dinner on the floor. However, I think anyone reading that would come to the same conclusion that the most likely explanation was that the dog knocked the food over. If the evidence makes one explanation more likely then another, then that is the best "theory" to go with.
It's all about probability. In my dinner example, would the probablity that the dog explanation was correct be changed at all depending on the number of people who believed it? Let's say 99 people all thought that a divine force dropped my dinner on the floor and only 1 thought the dog did it. Does that change the evidence? Would you then say that it must have been the divine force? That's essentially what you're suggesting with creationism. It's right purely because a bunch of people say it's right, regardless of facts or evidence to the contrary.
Science, however, is not based on opinion polls. It's based on an examination of the physical evidence. In the case of creationism, there is exactly as much physical evidence of the genesis story being true as their is that a giant space being sneezed us out of his nose (that is that there is no evidence at all). The science of evolution, while not perfect, was not created just out of thin air. They started by looking at the physical evidence and attempting to find an explanation for that evidence. Thus, the evidence creates the theory. We didn't go looking for fossils so we could prove our theory of evolution. We came up with the theory of evolution because we'd found all these fossils and were attempting to explain where they came from and how they got there.
Thus, when confronted with one idea that has zero physical evidence to support it, and another that was generated by the evidence, which should we think is most true?
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Personally I find both theories a bit far fetched. There is no fossil proof (that I know of) that links the chain of evolution. Each time someone yells they found "the missing link" it is always a hoax. Likewise I have yet to see proove everything just appeared or was created. Does evolution makes sense? Maybe, but then again wouldn't anything tought to you as fact make perfect sense? There just is not the proof there to take the leap and say its fact. And without that proof why should it be taught as fact to children?
Wait! What exactly do you think the theory of evolution is? Remember that the "missing link" is just one part of the theory (and not so much a part of it as a counter to it). Also, just because no one has found one, does not invalidate the theory. You're saying in effect that creationsim and evolution are equally far fetched simply because one very small part of evolution can't be verified. You are aware that the "missing link" is just theoretical as well, right? It's absense does not mean anything. There are many possibilities within evolution, and the missing link is just one possible way to explain how we evolved. More importantly, the missing link is an assumed flaw in the theory generally espoused by creationists attempting to debunk it. The idea is that evolution requires that organisms change from one form to another, so there must be a "missing link" between our form today and that of earlier primates. The absense of this mystical missing link (according to creationists) disproves the whole theory.
Unfortunately, that's again using the flawed idea that a single wrong part disproves the whole. Religious people tend to proceed from the "this is 100% right" angle, so if any part is disproven then the whole is wrong (if it's not 100% right, then it's all wrong). Science (how many times do I have to say this) does not work that way.
What we can say is that the fossil records do suggest that life has existed on this planet for *much* longer then creationsism allows. We can also say that organisms generally become more complex over time, implying that they "evolve". However, that says nothing about the evolution of any single species. We're only looking at general trends of all species. We cannot say with certainty what evolutionary path humans took. Nor can we point to any other primates and say with certainty that any are direct ancestors to us evolutionarily. That's a misrepresentation of the theory fostered by creationists.
I think you really really need to go read a book on evolutionary theory. It's not that cut and dried, and it has to do with a hell of a lot more then just whether or not humans evolved out of somem kind of ape. If it was just that, then I'd kinda agree with you, since the fossil record there is extremely sketchy. But it's built up out of millions of other types of fossils that all follow a patern and attempting to make sense out of that pattern. It's also formed out of not making the assumption that humans are "different" then everything else on the planet. If other stuff evolved, it makes the most sense that we did as well, even if we can't actually find the fossils of our earlier selves.
