> Then if someone doesn't agree with their religious philosophy they take away their grants and refuse to publish contrary evidence.
I have trouble finding creationists who have submitted papers on the topic for publication at all, let alone been arbitrarily rejected.
For that matter, there's no one to prevent them from publishing these hypothetical rejected papers on the internet. But for some reason all we get is bunkum targeted at the scientifically illiterate rather than "contrary evidence".
> Doing Grad work is quite a bit difficult w/o a 4 year degree though in some fields and at some schools it is possible
Ah, my bad again. I thought you guys used "grad" and "post grad" differently from the way we do.
> For me there is far too much circular logic in evolutionary theories
Such as?
> and far too many people trying to make a name for themselves and falsifying evidence to do so
Who would that be?
We know Piltdown Man was a hoax, but we don't know who did it. We know one of the famous "dinobird" fossils from China was a hoax, and we also know that it was forged by a fossil collector who wanted to inflate his finds' market value.
And BTW, in both cases the hoaxes were exposed by palentologists.
Re Lucy and Archy, if they are fakes you need to inform the paleontologists who study these things. Also, I don't see the point of mentioning a few things about Archy that are like modern birds, while neglecting to mention the things that are like the theropod dinosaurs whence they arose.
Nor do I get your point about Mt.St. Helens and fossilization. Are you saying that you're aware of problems that paleontologists aren't aware of? If so, you should publish a paper on it.
> Every science we have shows that the accidental appearance of mankind on earth is as close to a statistical impossibility as the science of statistics allows.
Please pick three of those sciences, and show the statistical calculations they offer in support of your claim.
> > How can science really yet show that the evolution of humanity is a statistical fluke?
> Easy. Take a look at the odds of RNA forming via abiogenesis. The odds are ridiculously low.
How can you possibly calculate the odds of something happening when you don't know the details of what caused it or how it happened?
> And just to forestall the inevitable arguments, these probabilities are created by examing the chances of formation for the various molecules involved. It's not guesswork.
No, it's bullshit. The way creationists calculate these probabilities is to assume that the identity of each base in a strand of DNA is the result of an independent random draw. If we analyze everything on the basis of that kind of assumption, we should be utterly astonished that we always get H2O and NaCL when we mix HCl and NaOH, or that apples always fall in directions that all converge at the center of the earth, or that there is a correlation between distance from earth and redness, etc.
Mechanism is everything. Using irrelevant statistical calculations (which you haven't actually offered, BTW) to show that something didn't happen is absurd.
> Evolution can't start until you've got replicating systems that carry information.
> Proof? Easy. Look up The Fermi Paradox. One of the corollaries that convince me is the fact that, even at sublight speeds, it only takes 1-10 million years to fill up a galaxy, since a race would tend to fill up in a geometric progression.
That assumes that some significant fraction of the founded colonies would dedicate themselves and the fruits of their labor to colonizing at least two other planets, generation after generation for millions of years, rather than trying to see who acquired the most toys before they died and wasting their time on political or religious bickering.
In our world we have trouble sustaining expensive technical initiatives from one election cycle to the next, let alone over the entire history of civilization.
> I always wondered why humans were the only form of 'advanced' intelligence... Seems odd, compared to all the life out their in the forests, plains and wilderness
Suppose an alien collector picked up a human, a chimp, and an earthworm. How would he group them into two categories of intelligence?
Also, why is intelligence the crucial metric? Shouldn't we be equally dazzled that some species has the longest tail, another runs the fastest, another has the kinkiest reproductive procedures, etc?
> > The curious thing is why (s)he made everything look like the whole shebang was 13,000,000,000 years old.
> I wonder about this myself. If the creationists are right that means the Creator is at least a malicious trickster, or something more evil. Why would he create the Universe as a charade? Does he/she/it want to puzzle us, to play tricks on us?
Yeah, it's funny (in a sad sort of way) to see creationists suggesting that God faked the universe to fool scientists, and never pausing to consider that such a God might also fake scripture to fool creationists.
If things aren't as they seem, scientists aren't the only ones who can't trust the ground they're standing on.
> I have to say that your the first person I know of that has ever called Imperial College London a trade school [...] But to answer your implied insult [...]
Sorry; I was just reporting what I discovered from a quick google search.
BTW, I'm a big fan of education. If someone "only" gets a two-year degree from a community college, good on them. I just want to call attention to the absurdity of you parading out your rather weak credentials in an unrelated field as if that made you an expert on evolution. (If your credentials aren't superb, best not to mention them at all - on this topic or any other.)
> since you are apparently unable to read properly the work I did in laminar flow was grad work not immediately following my O, A/S, A and S levels, and thus well beyond an associates degree.
I still don't see anything in either of your posts that suggests that you actually have any sort of four-year degree at all, though you're obviously trying to pile on your academic credentials. If you think your academic credentials are relevant, please state plainly what degrees you have and what fields they're in.
Of course, I'm more interested in the accuracy of your claims and the soundness of your logic than I am in your sheepskin credentials. It just annoys me to see how often undercredentialed creationists try to puff up their credentials in order to appear qualified to pontificate on the topic.
BTW, to preempt the obvious questions questions, I have no relevant credentials at all. Please evaluate my posts on the basis of their content rather than of their poster.
> BTW, as far as the other poster's point about creation theorists having no advanced degrees; i'd unfortunately have to agree that many DO in fact, have advanced degrees and serious publications to their names.
Not really that many, and even fewer have relevant advanced degrees. When the creationists presented a list of "50 scientists who question engineering" to the Ohio state school board a couple of years back, they had to dip into civil engineers and dentists to come up with a list of 50 people with advanced degrees who would sign their statement. Philip Johnson, the intellectual founder of the modern ID movment, is (IIRC) a retired professor of law. William Dembski, the guy who peddles bullshit about "complex specified information" and misrepresents the CS "No Free Lunch Theorem" actually has three PhD equivalents - Mathematics, Philosophy, and Theology. Michael Behe, the guy who pushes the irreducible complexity argument, is a biochemist - about the closest thing you'll find to a biologist in the whole lot. But when you get beyond those intellectuals (all associated with the Discovery Institute, a branch of the neocon Center for Renewal of Science and Culture), most of the leading creationists don't have any relevant degree at all, and several of the most prominent even have mail-order PhDs.
You can find more about this (and much else) at talkorigins.org."
> The foundation of common ancestry evolution is centred around God. [...] So the debate is far from scientific - it is a debate rooted in the question of whether God exists or not, and what His role in Creation is.
Your attempt at "debate" is certainly far from scientific, but that hardly means that what scientists are doing is scientific. In particular, biological scientists are in the business of explaining a huge pile of observations, and the theory of evolution is the best explanation any one has come up with. Your fifth-grader's logic is irrelevant to that adventure.
> I deny the likelihood that all living things share a common ancestor.
What has "likelihood" got to do with it? Have you got probability calculations you'd like to show us?
> Creation based science is still science just like evolution based science is still science.
"Creation based science" would be science by definition - if it existed.
Unfortunately, whenever you ask someone to fill you in on "creation based science" all you get is a bunch of tired and long-refuted arguments against evolution.
> I for one would argue a young earth and creation and most likely I have a far greater science background than you (based on statistics not you personally, you could hold 17 post grad degrees for all I know) In my own case I have done grad work in both physics and chemistry (specifically ceramics and materials sciences with specific research in to the laminar flow of water at high pressures (30,000+ PSI typically 60 - 100k PSI though) I have S Levels in both Physics and Chemistry (for those of you who know what that means) A levels in Biology and Mathematics (both Pure and Applied) and so on and so forth (all this rambling just means that 1) I am most definitely able to pass decent classes in uni and am in fact qualified to teach many of them also)
I.e., you have the equivalent of what USAians would call an Associate's Degree in the laminar flow of water from a community college or trade school, and that makes you competent to reject all the science done by all the biologists who have spent their careers studying evolution?
> I certainly could point out as many fallacies/issues with old earth studies and evolution as you could conceive of with creationism.
Please do so. Actually, you don't even need to point out "many" for us; the five or ten most critical ones would suffice to make your point.
> Evolution that teaches common ancestry of all living things is a theory that explains everything and predicts nothing.
No, you're wrong on both counts. For a couple of easy examples, it doesn't explain the origin of whatever chemical self-replicators evolved into life AWKI, and it predicts that a chicken will never be born to a dinosaur.
(Ironically, many of the most vocal creationists think the ToE does do those things.)
> Common ancestry evolution predicts nothing - anyone can make up an explanation why, and it will seem feasible simply because people aren't all geniuses (by today's standards) and because humans are heads and shoulders above all the animals. It's an explanation after the fact.
I don't suppose you're aware that Darwin published his original take on evolution even before Mendel had done the most rudimentary work laying the foundation of genetics. The theory of evolution demanded a reproductive mechanism that (a) allowed traits to be passed from parent to child, and (b) allowed randomized variations to be included in the process. Everything we've learned about genetics since then (i.e, the whole damn field) has vindicated that requirement in spades.
Creation, OTOH, really doesn't predict anything. It doesn't require any reproductive mechanism at all, let alone one with the above properties. Babies really could be brought around by storks without violating any requirement of creationism.
Actually, common ancestry predicts that when we discover a new species (whether it be goat or bacterium), we should find that if we sequence its DNA, it shares a certain degree of similarity to that of known organisms.
This is no more a proof of common ancestry than it is of common design.
Actually, your assertion was that the theory of evolution "predicts nothing", and he gave an example that shows you don't know what you're talking about. Changing the argument isn't going to fix that.
> One does not look at the various cars on the market today and postulate that they share a common ancestor.
Some of us have noticed that cars don't reproduce themselves, and thus don't have any ancestors at all - common or otherwise.
> One concludes, rather, that they have a common creator.
Actually, they don't. Cars are and have been created by many different people or groups of people. (Are you arguing for polytheistic creation?)
> There are many components and designs that are shared in common with various vehicles, and other parts that are unique to each type. If one wants precedence for what a similar genetic makeup means, one should look at what humans have created - it demonstrates a common designer, not a common ancestor.
And the parts that are not the same in different kinds of cars indicates that they didn't have a common designer?
As I just posted elsewhere, creationism is compatible with any observation. Evolution is not.
> And how, exactly, would one falsify the claim that all living things share a common ancestor?
Find lifeforms that don't work the same way.
> Normally falsifiability requires a repeatable, empirical experiment.
For astronomers too?
> What experiment do you recommend for falsifying common ancestry?
Show that the relationship between genomes and the tree of life are random rather than parallel.
> I could be off but I seem to remember reading/hearing something a while back when I wondered why, if we are the highest evolved animal are we so useless at birth.
FYI we're not "the highest evolved"; we merely have the highest opinion of ourselves. Given our common ancestry with other animals (and plants, etc.), arguably all species are equally evolved. We simply haven't all evolved to exploit the same environmental niches the same way.
> but perhaps more effort should be spent on matters such as irreducible complexity.
IC is useless as an argument against evolution. It's defined as "what's left when you have removed all the parts you can without breaking something", and the unspoken assumptions required when invoking IC as an argument for evolution denial are (1) that evolution requires running that problem backwards: start with something that's broken, and add a part that fixes it, and (2) that evolution doesn't allow "broken" stuff to be around.
Re (1), everyone with a clue about evolution knows that it primarily operates by adapting existing "parts" to new functions rather than building them up piecewise from scratch. The evolutionary history of the bones in your middle ear are an excellent example of this phenomenon.
Re (2), evolution does allow "broken" stuff to be around.
But for the target audience (biblical literalists), who don't have a clue about how evolution really works and don't have any incentive to question arguments that reinforce their religious beliefs, the IC argument sounds correct and "scientific", and since it is offered by a Real Scientist (tm) with a PhD in biochemistry they allow themselves to believe that it trumps all the knowledge of all the scientists that actually study evolution and submit their work for peer review to get the errors out.
> Evolution runs into trouble at the cellular level with the high level of complexity that has yet to be replicated from base chemicals by modern labs. If, with the input of directed effort by an intelligent person, we can't generate what the cells that all life is built from, then the house of cards falls down.
The funniest thing about the entire "Intelligent Design" movement (and that's a big pile of funny stuff) is the claim that the inability of intelligent people to do something is evidence that only an intelligent being could have done it.
(Now go back and read your argument as quoted above.)
> Or perhaps Louis Savain could explain just how evolution constitutes a religion any more than, say, atomic theory?
Easy. When science produces a result that refutes some detail of your religious beliefs and you can't challenge the science on any other ground, you relabel it as 'religion' in hopes that the feeble-minded will think you have leveled the playing field.
> If however by evolution you mean that all living things share a common ancestor - then that has very little evidence
Unfortunately for you, evolution is the best explanation for two big piles of evidence, morphology and genetic structure, known together as "the twin nested hierarchy".
If you have a better explanation for this stuff, you should get busy and submit a paper about it to a biology conference. However, you seem to be in denial about the factual existence of the evidence, which makes me doubt that you've got a good theory (or even a bad one) to rival evolution as the explanation for it.
> He or she will for sure say "Because God created you that way. It is meant to be a way to test the strength of your faith in the Lord."
> The problem with these people is that they cannot be convinced that they are wrong.
The reason that creationism doesn't have a theory, and never will, is that any observation is compatible with "because God wanted it that way". Theories are attempts to explain how some aspect of the universe works, and claims that are compatible with every possible (and impossible) observation aren't explanations of anything. You might as well publish a science textbook that has nothing but a wildcard for the text explaining why things work the way they do.
> If you seriously gravity and evolution have the same amount of proof you have a long way to go in your understanding of either concept.
Actually, you're really confused about science. You're talking about two bodies of observations that demand explanations, "gravity" and "evolution". The explanations are called 'theories', "the theory of gravity" and "the theory of evolution".
Relativity supplies our current best theory of gravity, though we're working on stuff like string theory and loop quantum gravity in hopes of addressing the difficulties of reconciling relativity and quantum mechanics (which both work excellently at their respective scales, but seem to miss each other where we'd like to drive the Golden Spike).
The neo-darwinian synthesis supplies our current best theory of evolution.
However much creationists rage against it, evolution isn't going to go away any more than gravity is.
Slashdot Mirror
> Then if someone doesn't agree with their religious philosophy they take away their grants and refuse to publish contrary evidence.
I have trouble finding creationists who have submitted papers on the topic for publication at all, let alone been arbitrarily rejected.
For that matter, there's no one to prevent them from publishing these hypothetical rejected papers on the internet. But for some reason all we get is bunkum targeted at the scientifically illiterate rather than "contrary evidence".
> Doing Grad work is quite a bit difficult w/o a 4 year degree though in some fields and at some schools it is possible
Ah, my bad again. I thought you guys used "grad" and "post grad" differently from the way we do.
> For me there is far too much circular logic in evolutionary theories
Such as?
> and far too many people trying to make a name for themselves and falsifying evidence to do so
Who would that be?
We know Piltdown Man was a hoax, but we don't know who did it. We know one of the famous "dinobird" fossils from China was a hoax, and we also know that it was forged by a fossil collector who wanted to inflate his finds' market value.
And BTW, in both cases the hoaxes were exposed by palentologists.
Re Lucy and Archy, if they are fakes you need to inform the paleontologists who study these things. Also, I don't see the point of mentioning a few things about Archy that are like modern birds, while neglecting to mention the things that are like the theropod dinosaurs whence they arose.
Nor do I get your point about Mt.St. Helens and fossilization. Are you saying that you're aware of problems that paleontologists aren't aware of? If so, you should publish a paper on it.
> So a monkey that changes it's behavior because it is sick is proof of "survival of the fittest"?
I doubt it. I'm just inviting the evolution deniers to put up or shut up.
BTW, I notice that nobody has offered the requested list...[cue crickets]...
> Does anyone have any information on Lucy? Is there any reason to believe that it was a hoax?
See the talkorigins.org short article on Lucy.
> Every science we have shows that the accidental appearance of mankind on earth is as close to a statistical impossibility as the science of statistics allows.
Please pick three of those sciences, and show the statistical calculations they offer in support of your claim.
> > How can science really yet show that the evolution of humanity is a statistical fluke?
> Easy. Take a look at the odds of RNA forming via abiogenesis. The odds are ridiculously low.
How can you possibly calculate the odds of something happening when you don't know the details of what caused it or how it happened?
> And just to forestall the inevitable arguments, these probabilities are created by examing the chances of formation for the various molecules involved. It's not guesswork.
No, it's bullshit. The way creationists calculate these probabilities is to assume that the identity of each base in a strand of DNA is the result of an independent random draw. If we analyze everything on the basis of that kind of assumption, we should be utterly astonished that we always get H2O and NaCL when we mix HCl and NaOH, or that apples always fall in directions that all converge at the center of the earth, or that there is a correlation between distance from earth and redness, etc.
Mechanism is everything. Using irrelevant statistical calculations (which you haven't actually offered, BTW) to show that something didn't happen is absurd.
> Evolution can't start until you've got replicating systems that carry information.
What is 'information', in this context?
> Proof? Easy. Look up The Fermi Paradox. One of the corollaries that convince me is the fact that, even at sublight speeds, it only takes 1-10 million years to fill up a galaxy, since a race would tend to fill up in a geometric progression.
That assumes that some significant fraction of the founded colonies would dedicate themselves and the fruits of their labor to colonizing at least two other planets, generation after generation for millions of years, rather than trying to see who acquired the most toys before they died and wasting their time on political or religious bickering.
In our world we have trouble sustaining expensive technical initiatives from one election cycle to the next, let alone over the entire history of civilization.
> I always wondered why humans were the only form of 'advanced' intelligence... Seems odd, compared to all the life out their in the forests, plains and wilderness
Suppose an alien collector picked up a human, a chimp, and an earthworm. How would he group them into two categories of intelligence?
Also, why is intelligence the crucial metric? Shouldn't we be equally dazzled that some species has the longest tail, another runs the fastest, another has the kinkiest reproductive procedures, etc?
> A space cowboy, a space priest, etc all in a very unrealistic setting
So... Which SF shows do you think have realistic settings?
> > The curious thing is why (s)he made everything look like the whole shebang was 13,000,000,000 years old.
> I wonder about this myself. If the creationists are right that means the Creator is at least a malicious trickster, or something more evil. Why would he create the Universe as a charade? Does he/she/it want to puzzle us, to play tricks on us?
Yeah, it's funny (in a sad sort of way) to see creationists suggesting that God faked the universe to fool scientists, and never pausing to consider that such a God might also fake scripture to fool creationists.
If things aren't as they seem, scientists aren't the only ones who can't trust the ground they're standing on.
> I have to say that your the first person I know of that has ever called Imperial College London a trade school [...] But to answer your implied insult [...]
Sorry; I was just reporting what I discovered from a quick google search.
BTW, I'm a big fan of education. If someone "only" gets a two-year degree from a community college, good on them. I just want to call attention to the absurdity of you parading out your rather weak credentials in an unrelated field as if that made you an expert on evolution. (If your credentials aren't superb, best not to mention them at all - on this topic or any other.)
> since you are apparently unable to read properly the work I did in laminar flow was grad work not immediately following my O, A/S, A and S levels, and thus well beyond an associates degree.
I still don't see anything in either of your posts that suggests that you actually have any sort of four-year degree at all, though you're obviously trying to pile on your academic credentials. If you think your academic credentials are relevant, please state plainly what degrees you have and what fields they're in.
Of course, I'm more interested in the accuracy of your claims and the soundness of your logic than I am in your sheepskin credentials. It just annoys me to see how often undercredentialed creationists try to puff up their credentials in order to appear qualified to pontificate on the topic.
BTW, to preempt the obvious questions questions, I have no relevant credentials at all. Please evaluate my posts on the basis of their content rather than of their poster.
> BTW, as far as the other poster's point about creation theorists having no advanced degrees; i'd unfortunately have to agree that many DO in fact, have advanced degrees and serious publications to their names.
Not really that many, and even fewer have relevant advanced degrees. When the creationists presented a list of "50 scientists who question engineering" to the Ohio state school board a couple of years back, they had to dip into civil engineers and dentists to come up with a list of 50 people with advanced degrees who would sign their statement. Philip Johnson, the intellectual founder of the modern ID movment, is (IIRC) a retired professor of law. William Dembski, the guy who peddles bullshit about "complex specified information" and misrepresents the CS "No Free Lunch Theorem" actually has three PhD equivalents - Mathematics, Philosophy, and Theology. Michael Behe, the guy who pushes the irreducible complexity argument, is a biochemist - about the closest thing you'll find to a biologist in the whole lot. But when you get beyond those intellectuals (all associated with the Discovery Institute, a branch of the neocon Center for Renewal of Science and Culture), most of the leading creationists don't have any relevant degree at all, and several of the most prominent even have mail-order PhDs.
You can find more about this (and much else) at talkorigins.org."
> The foundation of common ancestry evolution is centred around God. [...] So the debate is far from scientific - it is a debate rooted in the question of whether God exists or not, and what His role in Creation is.
Your attempt at "debate" is certainly far from scientific, but that hardly means that what scientists are doing is scientific. In particular, biological scientists are in the business of explaining a huge pile of observations, and the theory of evolution is the best explanation any one has come up with. Your fifth-grader's logic is irrelevant to that adventure.
> I deny the likelihood that all living things share a common ancestor.
What has "likelihood" got to do with it? Have you got probability calculations you'd like to show us?
> Creation based science is still science just like evolution based science is still science.
"Creation based science" would be science by definition - if it existed.
Unfortunately, whenever you ask someone to fill you in on "creation based science" all you get is a bunch of tired and long-refuted arguments against evolution.
> I for one would argue a young earth and creation and most likely I have a far greater science background than you (based on statistics not you personally, you could hold 17 post grad degrees for all I know) In my own case I have done grad work in both physics and chemistry (specifically ceramics and materials sciences with specific research in to the laminar flow of water at high pressures (30,000+ PSI typically 60 - 100k PSI though) I have S Levels in both Physics and Chemistry (for those of you who know what that means) A levels in Biology and Mathematics (both Pure and Applied) and so on and so forth (all this rambling just means that 1) I am most definitely able to pass decent classes in uni and am in fact qualified to teach many of them also)
I.e., you have the equivalent of what USAians would call an Associate's Degree in the laminar flow of water from a community college or trade school, and that makes you competent to reject all the science done by all the biologists who have spent their careers studying evolution?
> I certainly could point out as many fallacies/issues with old earth studies and evolution as you could conceive of with creationism.
Please do so. Actually, you don't even need to point out "many" for us; the five or ten most critical ones would suffice to make your point.
> Evolution that teaches common ancestry of all living things is a theory that explains everything and predicts nothing.
No, you're wrong on both counts. For a couple of easy examples, it doesn't explain the origin of whatever chemical self-replicators evolved into life AWKI, and it predicts that a chicken will never be born to a dinosaur.
(Ironically, many of the most vocal creationists think the ToE does do those things.)
> Common ancestry evolution predicts nothing - anyone can make up an explanation why, and it will seem feasible simply because people aren't all geniuses (by today's standards) and because humans are heads and shoulders above all the animals. It's an explanation after the fact.
I don't suppose you're aware that Darwin published his original take on evolution even before Mendel had done the most rudimentary work laying the foundation of genetics. The theory of evolution demanded a reproductive mechanism that (a) allowed traits to be passed from parent to child, and (b) allowed randomized variations to be included in the process. Everything we've learned about genetics since then (i.e, the whole damn field) has vindicated that requirement in spades.
Creation, OTOH, really doesn't predict anything. It doesn't require any reproductive mechanism at all, let alone one with the above properties. Babies really could be brought around by storks without violating any requirement of creationism.
> One does not look at the various cars on the market today and postulate that they share a common ancestor.
Some of us have noticed that cars don't reproduce themselves, and thus don't have any ancestors at all - common or otherwise.
> One concludes, rather, that they have a common creator.
Actually, they don't. Cars are and have been created by many different people or groups of people. (Are you arguing for polytheistic creation?)
> There are many components and designs that are shared in common with various vehicles, and other parts that are unique to each type. If one wants precedence for what a similar genetic makeup means, one should look at what humans have created - it demonstrates a common designer, not a common ancestor.
And the parts that are not the same in different kinds of cars indicates that they didn't have a common designer?
As I just posted elsewhere, creationism is compatible with any observation. Evolution is not.
> And how, exactly, would one falsify the claim that all living things share a common ancestor?
Find lifeforms that don't work the same way.
> Normally falsifiability requires a repeatable, empirical experiment.
For astronomers too?
> What experiment do you recommend for falsifying common ancestry?
Show that the relationship between genomes and the tree of life are random rather than parallel.
> I could be off but I seem to remember reading/hearing something a while back when I wondered why, if we are the highest evolved animal are we so useless at birth.
FYI we're not "the highest evolved"; we merely have the highest opinion of ourselves. Given our common ancestry with other animals (and plants, etc.), arguably all species are equally evolved. We simply haven't all evolved to exploit the same environmental niches the same way.
> I am a six day creation man, and have no problem at all believing in God making the whole shebang in under a week
Of course so, at least if (s)he has all the commonly ascribed attributes.
The curious thing is why (s)he made everything look like the whole shebang was 13,000,000,000 years old.
> and still retaining an IQ that could put me into mensa.
And you're an engineer???
> Jesus said that every knee shall bow before him
And this ape has the yarbles to stand up straight!
> but perhaps more effort should be spent on matters such as irreducible complexity.
IC is useless as an argument against evolution. It's defined as "what's left when you have removed all the parts you can without breaking something", and the unspoken assumptions required when invoking IC as an argument for evolution denial are (1) that evolution requires running that problem backwards: start with something that's broken, and add a part that fixes it, and (2) that evolution doesn't allow "broken" stuff to be around.
Re (1), everyone with a clue about evolution knows that it primarily operates by adapting existing "parts" to new functions rather than building them up piecewise from scratch. The evolutionary history of the bones in your middle ear are an excellent example of this phenomenon.
Re (2), evolution does allow "broken" stuff to be around.
But for the target audience (biblical literalists), who don't have a clue about how evolution really works and don't have any incentive to question arguments that reinforce their religious beliefs, the IC argument sounds correct and "scientific", and since it is offered by a Real Scientist (tm) with a PhD in biochemistry they allow themselves to believe that it trumps all the knowledge of all the scientists that actually study evolution and submit their work for peer review to get the errors out.
> Evolution runs into trouble at the cellular level with the high level of complexity that has yet to be replicated from base chemicals by modern labs. If, with the input of directed effort by an intelligent person, we can't generate what the cells that all life is built from, then the house of cards falls down.
The funniest thing about the entire "Intelligent Design" movement (and that's a big pile of funny stuff) is the claim that the inability of intelligent people to do something is evidence that only an intelligent being could have done it.
(Now go back and read your argument as quoted above.)
> Or perhaps Louis Savain could explain just how evolution constitutes a religion any more than, say, atomic theory?
Easy. When science produces a result that refutes some detail of your religious beliefs and you can't challenge the science on any other ground, you relabel it as 'religion' in hopes that the feeble-minded will think you have leveled the playing field.
> If however by evolution you mean that all living things share a common ancestor - then that has very little evidence
Unfortunately for you, evolution is the best explanation for two big piles of evidence, morphology and genetic structure, known together as "the twin nested hierarchy".
If you have a better explanation for this stuff, you should get busy and submit a paper about it to a biology conference. However, you seem to be in denial about the factual existence of the evidence, which makes me doubt that you've got a good theory (or even a bad one) to rival evolution as the explanation for it.
> He or she will for sure say "Because God created you that way. It is meant to be a way to test the strength of your faith in the Lord."
> The problem with these people is that they cannot be convinced that they are wrong.
The reason that creationism doesn't have a theory, and never will, is that any observation is compatible with "because God wanted it that way". Theories are attempts to explain how some aspect of the universe works, and claims that are compatible with every possible (and impossible) observation aren't explanations of anything. You might as well publish a science textbook that has nothing but a wildcard for the text explaining why things work the way they do.
> If you seriously gravity and evolution have the same amount of proof you have a long way to go in your understanding of either concept.
Actually, you're really confused about science. You're talking about two bodies of observations that demand explanations, "gravity" and "evolution". The explanations are called 'theories', "the theory of gravity" and "the theory of evolution".
Relativity supplies our current best theory of gravity, though we're working on stuff like string theory and loop quantum gravity in hopes of addressing the difficulties of reconciling relativity and quantum mechanics (which both work excellently at their respective scales, but seem to miss each other where we'd like to drive the Golden Spike).
The neo-darwinian synthesis supplies our current best theory of evolution.
However much creationists rage against it, evolution isn't going to go away any more than gravity is.