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Posted on 04/04/2002 10:05:32 AM PST by Heartlander
Before beginning, let's save bandwidth with a coded reference system:
"C1" = "God said it, I believe it."
"C2" = "...tornado...junkyard...jumbo jet..."
"C3" = "...evidence...intermediate species..."
"C4" = "Psalm 139"
and...
"E1" = "And I am not...I repeat...I am NOT medved!"
"E2" = "...billions of years..."
"E3" = "...original horizontality...climate change...fossil record..."
"E4" = any picture sequence like this: 
Basically, a claim that time has magical powers: a claim that, given enough time, things which have never been observed in the history of the world and which cannot be made to happen in controlled experiments, are gauranteed to happen. Kind of like a claim that given enough time, water will run uphill.
1. Go out to the country on a clear night and look up. What do you see, lots of stars. If you know where to look and it's relatively dark enough, you can easily see The Andromeda galaxy. Andromeda is the closest large galaxy(like the Milky Way). The photons of light that register on your retina have been traveling for roughly 2.3 million years. And this is the closest large galaxy. The most distant galaxy/object spotted so far is roughly 15 Billion light years away(Granted, with constantly moving away, the exact distance will vary but even with an order of magnitude, that's 1.5 billion light years). So what does that mean? We are dealing with vast periods of time. Not the six thousand years the Wacko Creationists believe.
2. Go out the front door and stand on the closest peice of dirt/grass you can find. Not start digging to look for fossils. I'd bet that 99.999999% would find nothing after a very long time searching. What does this mean? Well, I'd bet that in that very spot, there has been some form of life living in/on/over it for at least one billion years. So in all that time, you can find no fossil evidence of past life(I'm not talking about candy wrappers or other garbage, pure simple fossils like in the museums). What does that tell you? Simple, fossils are very, very rare. Sure you can go some places and find them all over the place, but the total of what you find is from millions of years of growth on that land. Do you think you could find enough fossils to reconstruct a garden bed at one time, let alone millionsof square miles of constant growth for hundreds of millions of years? Little know fact for you people - Before 1990 there were only ever 6 incomplete T-Rex's found in the entire world. I wonder how many actually existed through out history?
All of this boils down to refute the simplist of Creationist theories. You can't get from animal A to animal Z by evolution. The only reason they are able to say this is because we havn't found the very rarest evidence(fossils). Ahh but what happens when there is an animal(M) found that is between A and Z? Well, in the creationist argument you get the following. You can't get from animal A to animal M, nor from M to Z. Wash, Rinse, Repeat
Believe me, I'm a devout Christian, but that doesn't mean I have to check my brain at the door when it comes to Where/When/How/Why it all began. Unless God is playing a trick on us by craeting the Universe six thousand years ago and making it appear that it is > 13 Billion years old, I'll believe in an old Universe with a constant, omnipotent, loving caretaker making sure things work the way they do.
More like ice carvings--diamonds...too funny!
Is the theory of gravity "true"?
Science doesn't concern itself with apparently unresolvable theological questions, generally. Evolution is a pretty good story that seems to explain quite a lot, and we'll probably persist in telling it until a better story comes along. What you've called cladistic theory has not been seriously on the table, aside from the occasional freak accident, even for life's origins, for a couple of years now, ever since Woese's rearrangement of the basic roots of the Tree of Life, about 3 years ago, from Ribosomal mutational distance calculations over the domain of one-celled critters. You might recall that about 15 years ago, the micro-biologists were confidently predicting the demise of the osolote cats because their numbers had shrunk down below critical reproduction mass, with the consequent catastrophic loss of genetic variety. By the way, this argument fares very poorly if you restrict your attention to asexual reproducers, who can (at least, so we at first thought) only evolve by mutation--no sex means no dominent and recessive genes to mix&match with--and probably isn't nearly as much fun.
Those who like to mull such things over, now generally subscribe to hot, weakly cohesive pre-cellular RNA communities, organized around energy-capturing enzymatic cycles (such as the citric cycle you digest your food with) gradually getting fixed into cellularity as the available energy became less available as the earth's mean temperature decreased. I can give you pointers, I think, if you are interested.
Both present-day monkeys and present-day men evolved from something else that it not presently walking around consuming oxygen. This is a story from a comic book you are operating on, and has no bearing on present-day science.
evolution is reality morphing---twisting...
putty--playdough science---"special" science!
It's a quantum universe, and if it lasts forever, water WILL eventually run uphill, once, somewhere, due to quantum effects. Electrons leap thru solid barriers every so often, and because of the frequency of the relevant experiments, we get to observe and calculate how often this particular form of "water running uphill" occurs. We presently are communicating because of this phenomena. You and Einstein apparently don't care for it, but, in fact, God does play dice with the universe.
That's good. Very good.
01: Site that debunks virtually all of creationism's fallacies. Excellent resource.
02: Creation "Science" Debunked.
03: Creationi sm and Pseudo Science. Familiar cartoon then lots of links.
04: The SKEPTIC annotated bibliography. Amazingly great meta-site!
05: The Evidence for Human Evolution. For the "no evidence" crowd.
06: Massive mega-site with thousands of links on evolution, creationism, young earth, etc..
07: Another amazing site full of links debunking creationism.
08: Creationism and Pseudo Science. Great cartoon!
09: Glenn R. Morton's site about creationism's fallacies. Another jennyp contribution.
11: Is Evolution Science?. Successful PREDICTIONS of evolution (Moonman62).
12: Five Major Misconceptions about Evolution. On point and well-written.
13: Frequently Asked But Never Answered Questions. A creationist nightmare!
14: DARWIN, FULL TEXT OF HIS WRITINGS. The original ee-voe-lou-shunist.
The foregoing was just a tiny sample. So that everyone will have access to the accumulated "Creationism vs. Evolution" threads which have previously appeared on FreeRepublic, plus links to hundreds of sites with a vast amount of information on this topic, here's Junior's massive work, available for all to review:
The Ultimate Creation vs. Evolution Resource [ver 16].
Did your parents die when you were born?
If you don't show me that math, this argument is so much wind. It amounts to saying that, because I can't conceive how something occured, therefore the odds against it are astronomical. This would be transparent nonsense if it were not so often accompanied by polysyllabic scientisms and apparent examples concocted from the imagination, as with Behe et. al.
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