[quote]Gregus wrote:
And that’s cool with me. However i spoke to a few college students and they all are convinced that evolution is a proven FACT and no longer a theory. This is where i have a problem. The evolutionists are very zelaous in teaching their theory by skimming over the fact that this is still an unproven theory.[/quote]
Evolution IS a fact. Nobody denies that, not even the fundamentalists, because they’ve seem it happen (in labs, in the world, etc.). Creationists call this micro-evolution, and they’re generally fine with it.
Now, the problem lies in speciation. Creationists do not accept that we began as single-cell organisms that, through many, many steps of micro-evolution, became all the different species that we see today, plus all the ones that became extinct. This, they call macro-evolution.
As far as theories: The proposed mechanisms by which animals adapt genetically to their circumstances, thus evolving, and eventually spawn different species, such that we can trace back every living creature’s beginings to a single-sell organism in the deep past, is called The Theory of Evolution.
As far as it being “just” a theory, I’m afraid it doesn’t get better than that. It’s already been pointed out before, but I’ll repeat it in hopes that it will be understood once and for all (and a clearer case of unfounded faith I never saw):
A theory is constructed around facts. When new facts are discovered, they are compared to the theory, if they agree, great! If the new facts don’t agree, then the theory is modified to explain both the old, and new facts. As time goes by, more and more facts appear. The more facts you have, the more complete your theory will be. This also means that the longer a theory is around, the more likely it is to be correct, in general, because new facts will only change details of the theory, as the grounds on which it stands are by now pretty solid.
Why doesn’t it get better than this? Because you have to provide every single piece of evidence in order to “prove it is truth.” In general, this cannot be accomplished, because you would require an infinite number of pieces of evidence.
Why is Creationism not a theory? When it appeared, it explained everything really well; how all the animals got to be here, how long we’d been here, etc. When dinosaur fossils, and fossils of extinct animals began to surface, it said, “well, that’s explained in the Bible: the flood, the monsters, etc.” Up to now it’s still behaving like a theory.
The problem came when fossils of human ancestors began to surface, when Darwin pulished his Origin of the Species, and later when physics proved the age of the Earth was 4.5 billion years, when the age of the Universe was found to be of the order of 15 billion years, when DNA was discovered, when the mechanism for physical changes (mutations) was discovered, etc., etc.
Creation could not explain or account for all of these findings. And here Creationism proved it was not a theory. Had it been so, it would have incorporated all these findings into its main body, instead it treated them as peripheral anomalies, citing faith-testing, lying scientists and other such reasons for not taking them into account.
Basically, Creationism says: This is my story, and I’m sticking to it. If anything is discovered that doesn’t agree with what I’m saying, then that piece of evidence is faulty, wrong, or otherwise unacceptable and shall be ignored.
So now, please, pretty please, with a frickin cherry on top:
[b]STOP SAYING IT’S JUST A THEORY AND BRING SOMETHING OF SUBSTANCE TO THE DISCUSSION[b].