[OnyxCougar]

Originally Posted by alphageek31337

Since this got dredged up from the dark, horrible recesses of the Cellar, I feel I must add my opinions. I don't necessarily buy evolution part and parcel, but I see it as a much stronger jumping off point than "God made the world as it is today and it has not changed at all ever".

Taking up the Creationist Science side, no one in Creation Science thinks "God made the world as it is today and it has not changed at all ever". Of course it has changed. Of course speciation and mutations occur. That is observable. It happens.

Darwinian competition ("Survival of the Fittest") can be observed in the world today, with the evolution (yes, whether you believe evolution started it all or not, you cannot deny that it is happening today) of such things as antibiotic-resistant bacteria and the commonly cited case of Peppered Moths in Britain.

What you are describing is speciation, or mutation, which are one of the 6 definitions of evolution. Again, speciation and mutation happens. No question of that.

For those of you unfamiliar with the moths, the basic idea is thus: there are moths in England that tend to gather on a tree with white bark. These moths varied in color from almost pure white to pure black. A pure black moth is easy for predators to spot, so the population tended to include very few pure or mostly black moths, with the dominance of color leaning toward the white moths. Around the time of the industrial revolution, however, a shift occurred. Coal smoke from nearby factories blackened the trees, suddenly making white moths very visible and black moths quite well hidden. Thus, obviously, the population swung toward black moths.

Actually, the peppered moth experiment was proven to be a hoax. They glued the moths to the trees. I cited the many references in this or a another EvC thread here on the cellar, but it's not hard to find if you google it.

Now, it has been argued that since no new genetic information was created, that evolution did not occur, and this is true.

Exactly so. Evolution in the "molecules to man" sense means a GAIN of information. Which we NEVER see. All we can see (and prove) is a LOSS of information.

The moths are simply an example of natural selection, the driving force, the keystone if you will, behind evolution.

Evolution in the "mutation or speciation" sense, absolutely.

If an omniscient, omnipotent being created all the creatures of Earth, why do things like this have to change? Creatures needn't adapt, because they were created in perfect balance by a perfect being.

You are correct. God did make a perfect world. Then Adam and Eve ate the apple, and God told them, in effect, that's it, you've screwed it up for everyone now, and things began to deteriorate and change. In the bible, everything, every animal and person, were vegetarian. After the fall, it was open season, and animals began eating each other, and God made the first clothes from animal skins.

One might also note Albert's Squirrel on one side of the Grand Canyon versus the Kaibab Squirrel on the other side. The two are almost perfect genetic matches, with minor physical variations, and cannot interbreed. New genetic material and a new species were both created, theoretically by the Grand Canyon forming and splitting the populations. There we have proof that evolution does happen, though it will be impossible without some interesting manipulations of the fourth dimension to prove that it *did* happen.

No, we have proof speciation and mutations happen. Not proof that man evolved from a primordial soup billions of years ago.

Never has it been observed that God plopped a new species onto the Earth, though if Creationism is correct in its assumptions, he wouldn't have to. There will also always be gaps in the fossil record, because we must note that it is an extremely rare occurence for an animal to be fossilized after death. Even in extremely successful species with millions in population at one time (and, we must assume, an exponentially greater number of deaths), there are not terribly many preserved fossils, especially those of full bodies of a single organism, which would prove infinitely more useful than single or small groups of bones, which could easily be attributed to the animal before or after the transitional species. Transitional species are just that, transitional. They exist for a short time as one archetype moves toward another. There are not nearly as many of them as there are of successful archetypes, and they do not exist for as long a time (hence, fewer bodies and exponentially fewer fossils).

Agreed, and more "evidence" that we can't prove transitional species even existed. They may have, but we don't have proof. And isn't observable and/or recreatable proof what science is based upon?

On another note, one of the more common arguments for intelligent design is what I refer to as the automobile theory, essentially that evolution is just as likely as a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a complete, running automobile. The problem with this theory is that it assumes one junkyard, one planet on which life could possibly have evolved. Given that the universe is infinite (space is nothingness, nothingness can extend onward indefinitely, therefore the universe must be infinite in size), and that there are an absolutely mindblowingly large number of planets in the universe (a number large enough that it can be considered, for practical purposes, infinite), what is the likelihood that there is *not* a planet on which life could evolve? Essentially, given 1 junkyard and one tornado, the chances of assembling an automobile are infintessimally small, but given an infinite number of junkyards and an infinite number of tornados blowing through each of them, it is almost a guarantee that, at least once, the parts will come together by chance and form a running automobile. This is the same theory I present to people who don't believe that intelligent life exists off of the planet Earth: given an infinite number of attempts over time, even at infintessimally small odds, Earth cannot be the only place in the universe that fell within that precise range on the bell curve that permits intelligent life to develop. In fact, it is safe to assume that there are a vast multitude of civilzations throughout the universe.

I don't buy the "intelligent design" theory as put forth as "God used evolution". In my opinion, that is a cop out theory that tries to fit man's theory of evolution into a biblical framework. I'm a literal creationist. God did it like he said he did it in the bible. Trying to fit man's theories into that framework doesn't work for me. That is mostly because if I accept that God was lying when he said "DAY" (yom) and "he saw it was good", then what else is he lying about? That is why this issue is so important to Christianity, Judaism and Islam.

Also, as a sidenote for intelligent design theorists who wish to argue, "your theory is wrong" != "my theory is right". Simply poking holes in evolution does not mean that there is a God. Come up with scientifically backed data that withstands scrutiny and provides mechanisms to explain the changes in organisms that we have observed, and you will begin to actually prove your theory.

www.answersingenesis.org

Pokes holes in evolutionary theory AND puts forth new SCIENTIFIC theories that prove a young earth could have happened just as easily as an old earth.