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Originally Posted by Adamw
LOL. If you can't see in your every day life that evolution is everywhere, no one can help you.
To believe the world is 6000-10000 years old is naive at best. I completely believe in God's creation of existance, however, I also know that the Jews at the time of the Bible compilations weren't very intelligent as far as world events went down. They wrote about what they knew about. Easy.
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To say that the Hebrews or any other culture in antiquity were less intelligent is totally without merit. The ancient cultures pre-dating an organized Jewish culture had amazingly scientific concepts that without which would not have allowed for things like pyramids and such. Many of those cultures understood concepts that took more modern cutlures until recent centuries to figure out like pi.
As for the "scientific" evidence of evolution, it all depends on how you use the term evolution. On the wide scale (macroevolution) you would refer to long term changes that gives rise to new species from common ancestors. This is a vertical concept where vast changes happen that allow for say an invertibrat to grow a backbone, gather some intelligence, and become man.
Macroevolution is also without any proof. Darwin hypothesized that there would be a wealth of fossils in the record showing various transitory forms that linked the species and prove his theory, thus the term "missing link." Unfortunately for him he died never realizing that none could be found, and in fact, in the 150ish years since he died not a single missing link has been found.
Another aspect to macroevolution, and one which frustrates people like Dr. Gould and others, is that it violates some very important laws of physics. Evolution in the macro scale would, in order to be proven, would necessitate the need to disprove the second LAW of thermodynamics, Entropy.
The second law states that the total entropy of any isolated thermodynamic system tends to increase over time, approaching a maximum value, or simplfied, as time goes by matter gets more chaotic and breaks down. Unfortunately for evolutionary theory as it pertains to origins of life, entropy states that a primordial ooze, or the raw materials needed for life would not over time congeal and organize into a complex system, rather they would over time break down in a state of chaos.
To illustrate this point I use the idea of spontaeous life that evolutionist believe in, and one that was completely disproved by Louis Pasteur when he proved that life does not arise out of decay and it does not arise out of nothing. The odds of a universe filled with raw resources organizing into complex, intelligent life alone would rule it out according to science, but add in the fact that matter over time becomes more unstable and not more organized makes it impossible.
As far as Darwin's theory goes, there are other flaws in the logic. Darwin used Galapagos finches to show diversity, but this does not prove macroevolution, instead it reinforces the second aspect of evolution (microevolution).
Microevolution is the horizontal evolutionary aspect that is backed up by scientific law. By horizontal I refer to the aspect that the changes occur laterally within a species and do not involves a upwards change that creates a brand new species. It encompasses diversity (Darwin's finches), natural selection and survival of the fittest. In fact Darwins' finches when all was said and done, only showed diversity amongst a species, they were alway still finches.
The fact that three finches have three different beaks does not mean they evolved from anything but a finch, and the fossil record does not contain any evidence of a transitory finch/lizard or anything to back up long term evolutionary theory. On this area Darwin was wrong.
What is cited here as happening in a petri dish is true, but only as far as microevolution goes. As for accepted evidence and the argument of earth age, there are arguments on both sides. The age of the earth is certainly older than 10,000 years old, and it is the closed mindedness of my fellow Christians to argue otherwise.
Time is of course relative, and perception of it is skewed. There is an age old arguement based off of the book of Genesis where to God an hour is as a day. This argument has been used by some Christians to justify creation and still uphold an earth that is billions of years old, but that is a debate for another thread.
No matter how old you choose to accept the age of the earth, there has been plenty of recent scientific evidence that has called the Big Bang itself into question, and again one must question the Big Bang if for no other reason than the inherant effect of time on matter is chaos and not organization.
Light in and of itself is not the best proof because even light is controlled by physical laws that we do not yet fully have an understanding of. It is manipulated in its very movement by other forces, like gravity, and cannot always be a reliable source of evidence when judging its movement through such a vast universe. Even the complete understanding of physics hinges on theories that cannot be sufficently to explain the universe itself and that in and of itself makes the "evidence" suspect.
In question now is whether the universe is in fact expanding, contracting, or static. This raises further questions in regards to a shrinking universe from a Christian perspective, as to whether the theorized "Big Crunch" will play out in the biblical end times scenario, but again another argument best suited for its own thread.
I end this by saying that for one to argue macroevolution requires just as much faith as one who argues creation. Neither has given satifactory evidence of a scientfic nature to prove its case, however when one looks at existence as a whole, creation actually violates less scientific laws. Either way the burden of proof lies in one of two places. Either in a God who, if he does talk to man, does so selectively so as to make the proof questionable, or it lies in a fossil record that to this date has failed to yield its treasure.