Now I am at a computer that lets me post to long threads. I'll bring up this thread once again for these thoughts belong into it and not somewhere else.

Jerry has started (long time ago) this thread hoping that it will not be divisive, pitting people against each other. It has ended before this post as a quarrel about science and about evolution. Why? That's easy to understand. Most times, science and religions are Nonoverlapping Magisteria (S. J. Gould; I agree with much of what he writes). They have their say on completely different things. Scientists refrain to make statements about moral and ethics (except of course, as individuals), religions usually refrain from making statements of fact on fields on which science can make those. But from time to time science claims a new field on which one or more religion(s) have a stand too. Then it comes to a fight that invariably, sooner or late, has been lost by the religions.

The earth is not flat? That's in contradiction to Daniel 4:11 and Matthew 4:8 in which all kingdoms of the Earth can be seen from a mountain. The number of flat earthists has gone down considerably. The retreating fights of some religions for some claims have gone on for centuries. Natives in both Australia and America have challenged scientific findings that have been in contradiction to what their myths say about where they came from. Some Christians and some Muslims attack evolution because they consider the findings to be in contradiction to one particular reading of a big book.

They could in principle attack the theory of special relativity ("it's only a theory"!!) or the model of the atom and its nucleus ("that's only your faith"). They don't because there are no theological implications.

The anti-evolution front is far from being united. I have mentioned the flat earthists, there are the young earth creationists, the gap creationists (two creations at different times), the day-age creationists (creation it was, but at the evolutionists time-scale), the micro-evolution creationists (as Two Bears) who postulate creation for the species and a later micro-evolution. I have missed some groups but I'll mention the other extreme to the flat-earthists, the theistic evolutionists. They accept evolution as described by science but think it was God who has created the cosmos with all its laws to allow for later evolution from scratch, that is animated from unanimated matter.

The retreat can be spotted in the succession of the argumentation in court cases, a string of legal defeats. In the famous Scopes trial in 1925, in Bryan's last speech the accusation was that evolution was against God's writings and laws and that only a minority was supporting evolution.

Then came Creation Science, an endeavour abusing a good word for accumulating evidence only for one particular preconceived conclusion. It was put to final silence by the famous judgement of Overton. Bottom line: It isn't a science despite its name.

Then came 'Intelligent Design' and the clever accusation that science was a faith or religion too (I'm smiling to see Little Hawk using arguments from the religious far right with which he usually has nothing to do). In the 1990s, the Ninths Circuit court of Appeals ruled that a school district had a legal right to require one of its teachers to teach evolution because it is a scientific theory, and rejected the teacher's contention that there was such a thing as religion of evolutionsism (M. Pigliucci, Denying Evolution, 2002).

The schools of creationist thought only differ in how much of reality they accept, from the flat earthists to the theistic evolutionists who accept everything but postulate a divine creation of the cosmos before it ran completely on its own.

Two arguments to conclude:

Two Bears, your argumentation is based on analogies. Analogies are plausible for those sharing your basic convictions and are therefore good in teaching but fall completely flat with those not sharing the conviction. Your argument that if someone sees something complicated the conclusion is inevitable that there has to be a designer, is wrong for at least two reasons:
(1) There is something like 'design without intention' (example: snowflakes that look at close-up like works of an artist, though the laws of chemistry and the binding forces are well known)
(2) Theistic evolution mentioned above. These people accept everything in evolution you consider impossible and still believe in a designer.


'Evolution is just a theory' or similar sentences and sentiments are mistaken for they show ignorance of what a theory in science is and how it is related to facts. The body of facts points so clearly to evolution that any realistic theory has to be evolutionary to make sense ("Nothing in biology makes sense if not in the light of evolution", Dobzhansky, in: Biology Teacher, 1973; himself being a devout theist, by the way). There are several competing theories about the mechanism and the speed that come to different predictions ('punctuated equilibrium' being one example of such a theory), but since they start by trying to explain the same set of data they all start from evolution as a fact, the concrete mechanisms being under debate.

"This confusion between the purposes of science and religion is based on the fundamentalists' misunderstanding of their sacred scriptures as not only books on how to live, but also descriptions of how the universe works." (M. Pigliucci, Denying Evolution, 2002).

That was long enough. A shorter post directed at Amos will follow.

Wolfgang