Thanks, Bex, for sharing your thoughts here. An open and unusually non-inflammatory post for this forum. I'll try to do the same.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but your first few paragraphs seem to be saying that the scientific evidence should be presented in classrooms without saying that evolution is a fact. The thing is, it's hard not to conclude this when the evidence is actually presented in a thorough way. Here is a drastically abridged list that I presented in the let's-smear-the-evolutionists thread which is called Open Conspiracy:


I don't expect you to respond to every single item on this list, but these all qualify as evidence which supports evolution. I'm not sure how you could, or why you should (if you are an honest science teacher), present these with no reference at all to evolution. They're intertwined. How do we make sense of the world if we ignore evolution as a factor, when there's so much evidence and it's an important part of so many branches of science? You could of course say that we don't 100% understand how evolution works, which is true, and that scientists have different ideas about this.


I think what's important in science is that we always look at the existing evidence, be mindful of new evidence that emerges, and change our ideas accordingly if necessary. There is actually quite a lot of evidence that putting mercury in a person's mouth isn't a good idea. Whether people want to take that on board or not is another matter.

Like I've said to Russ, I think that equating evolutionists with people who say that amalgams are harmless is not a helpful analogy. We can see the evidence for evolution, it is not just propaganda, as the list above shows.


If you read the Abiogenesis thread, you will see information and links there which provide a fascinating illustration of what scientists have learned about the interaction between rudimentary self-replicating molecules and an environment like that of the early earth. They haven't "worked it all out," but it's more plausible now than it was a decade or two ago to say that life might have arisen from non-life.

After reading books by Rupert Sheldrake and Bruce Lipton, as I've mentioned in the (unfortunately named) "Evolution: The Big Joke" thread, I'm trying to be more open-minded. I don't think we understand a whole lot yet about how life interacts with its environment or with other kinds of life. Once we know more about that, maybe we'll have some new ideas about how life might have begun. It's one of the classic questions isn't it, along with "why are we here." Some of us don't want to stop with "it's all in the Bible." If we always stopped there then I don't think we'd end up learning much about how the world works because we would stop trying to find answers, we'd stop questioning and investigating.


I've asked this before though: Do you believe that we can never learn anything about the past, from evidence in the present? Can forensic scientists and detectives not study clues at the scene of a crime and work out what probably happened? Maybe we won't always have 100% certainty, but surely it would be nonsensical not to even look at the evidence and formulate hypotheses about what it means.


We talked about horse evolution a bit earlier. We can date fossils according to the layers in which they are found, as long as they are in situ, though there are other methods too like fluorine analysis, which can be applied in certain circumstances. So we know that the time line for horse evolution is accurate -- we know, for example, that hyracotherium lived 55 million years ago, and miohippus lived 35 million years ago. What's more, when we look at sample fossils of those listed, we can see phyletic gradualism -- the changes in these species through time. In the case of the horse it appears to have been gradual, a smooth but inexorable transition from one species to the next. Specialists around the world are in general agreement that these are horses, and they are people who spend their lives looking at bones. They know what to look for in a horse and presumably in other animals too. Before you mention Piltdown man then yes, scientists can sometimes be wrong, but Piltdown man was accepted too quickly without proper testing, and some scientists thought it was a hoax from the start.

So the question again is, if God created these horse fossils, put them in a specific order in specific strata around the world, and made it appear that they changed through time . . . why? And why did he do this for other species too? For me, the sorting of the fossil record is the single most convincing piece of evidence that evolution is real. I've seen answersingenesis try to explain how the fossil record was laid down by the flood but it doesn't wash when you check it out with how geology actually works. They obviously don't expect their readers to know much about that.


I have deduced that they are, because this is what the evidence clearly points to. It's got nothing to do with what I want to believe. You could just as well say that I have a fervent desire to believe that the sun shines, or that trees grow.


You might end up eventually with a new species that looks like a cat. This would be speciation, which is evolution.

Or instead of doing this artificially, then it's conceivably possible that environmental triggers would cause dogs to eventually evolve cat-like characteristics.

Observed instances of speciation

Interestingly, answersingenesis actually requires evolution in order for their flood idea to work. They say that after all the original "kinds" came off the ark, they changed very quickly over a few thousand years in order to produce the millions of different life forms we see today. I guess they feel they have to say this because it's obvious that there are too many known species to fit in a wooden boat -- but in doing so they've gone from saying there's no evolution to saying there's hyper-evolution -- all the while saying that there's still nothing but the original "kinds." This doesn't make much sense to me.


Every now and then, someone proposes an alternative to the big bang, though the onus is on them to show how their hypothesis explains the evidence at least as well. You can read about the most recent idea here. Like I said earlier, it's the evidence that needs to be the focus, and the big bang does explain much of what we see.

If we said "God did it," as you seem to want, then how will we ever learn about the world, or the universe? God can do anything he wants, so whatever we see is due to the mysterious workings of God. If people were thinking that thousands of years ago, I honestly doubt if we would have achieved the level of technology we have today. How would we even have worked out what electricity is if we continued to believe it was sent from a god or gods in the heavens? How would we have learned about the atom?


I actually believe that the divine is in everything and everyone. It is part of life. So creator/creation is a false dichotomy for me. Species evolving in response to their environment doesn't really change that.


No. I don't know how life started, or if we're even on the right track there, though I like reading about people's ideas. I do, however, see a lot of evidence that evolution has occurred.

I don't even accept the standard scientific dodge, which is "you can't prove it." I don't believe that science explains everything, as some people do. All I can say is that I'm truthfully playing my agnostic card here: "I don't know." If some evidence emerges which seems convincing, I'll evaluate it. I've read a lot of creation myths from different cultures and while I find them enjoyable, poetic, and instructive, I am not inclined to believe any of them literally.


Who's "you people"? I've been arguing with hyper-rationalist scientists on another forum and they're telling me I'm spouting delusions. Don't lump me in with them, they're not nice.

You asked about DNA. The scientific idea about that at the moment is that it started as self-replicating molecules. It wasn't even necessarily essential for the first life, as long as some kind of basic way of replacing worn-out components was possible. If you want to learn more about abiogenesis then you're welcome to look in that thread.

Many creationists claim that evolution was impossible because something is irreducibly complex, that it simply couldn't have evolved. Again, I'm not sure we'd learn much if we stopped at this. People used to think the atom was irreducibly complex. We never would have learned otherwise if we hadn't studied it to find out if this really was so.