I actually should have known better, and I did put that term in quotes for a reason. There is no such thing as a missing link or a transitional species, except as we look into the past and declare them thus retroactively. Every single living species today is either a future “missing link”/“transitional species” or a future evolutionary dead end. It’s only by looking at what has already happened that we can declare who the winners and losers are in the evolutionary game. Whenever anyone declares an extant species to be “in transition”, that person does not understand how evolution works. It’s entirely possible that the only “transition” that species will make will be to become extinct. And it’s entirely possible that that species might remain in a state of quasi-equilibrium for millions of years.
Of course, “inspired” is a vague weasel-word. A movie that is “inspired” by a book or historical event is a less accurate rendition than one than is merely “based on”.
Any Sunday sermon can be said to be “inspired” by God. That’s a far cry from declaring that it was dictated word-for-word by the Almighty.
You guys would drive Zeno to drink, except that he’d never be able to get the glass all the way to his mouth.
Stranger
Not that I’m a believer but the use of the word “inspiration” with regard to Christian sacred texts has a more specific theological connotation than the vague way it’s used in the other kinds of contexts you alluded to. Divine “inspiration” refers to a specific belief that a person has been infused with the Holy Spirit and that the Holy Spirit is performing the actions (or writing the texts) in question.
If you’ve ever seen Pentacostal Christians “filled with the Spirit” and talking in tongues, faith healing, prophesying, handling snakes, etc. that’s the kind of thing we’re talking about. The belief in “inspired” scripture is that the authors were literally possessed by the Spirit when they wrote.
God has inspired me to predict that his response will be that God works in mysterious ways which we should not expect to understand. 
Another thing that the OP might want to consider here is to tell us what type of proof he is looking for. What would convince him that macro-evolution actually has taken place? It can be very frustrating to be asked for evidence, and every time you come up with something the person says it is unpersuasive.
The only way to win is not to play.
How about a nice game of chess?
“Why don’t you pass the time with a game of solitaire?”
Stranger
Not much to add here but just wanted to comment that this thread should be sticky’ed. If you actually could convince a theist type creationist that there is overwhelming evidence that Evolution (the distinction between supposed Macroevolution vs Microevolution is pure bullshit) is fact, this would be the thread. So many good posts, so much good information…it SHOULD make a creationists head explode.
Kudos to all.
-XT
Actually, the bolded part is true only of some Fundamentalist beliefs inasmuch as the position of Catholic, Anglican, (most) Lutheran, and (most) Orthodox teachings holds that that would be a violation of free will.
I agree that “inspiration” has a somewhat different meaning in this context, but among the older Christian denominations it indicates that the Holy Spirit conveyed the general message, but that the specific writings are filtered and shaped by the personality, experience, and faith of each author, not directly written by the Spirit.
(I suspect that DtC knows this, but I did not want to leave a mistaken impression among the peanut gallery.)
This would be a violation of Freeman’s Commentary on Ginsberg’s Theorem.
I really wish that people who accept evolution would educate themselves on this matter. The distinction is not bullshit, pure or otherwise. Don’t believe me? Then believe Talkorigins, which many here have already linked to:
I’ve already mentioned the whole speciation process thing above, of course. And, as I noted, speciation is not something that can be easily understood based solely on the concept of adaptation through natural selection. (Admittedly, there is often disagreement whether speciation as a process falls within the domain of microevolution or macroevolution.) So it is a mistake to state even that the mechanisms between the two are the same. Macroevolution is not just a whole lot of microevolution. Sure, macro- doesn’t exists without micro-, but one cannot extrapolate mass-extinctions and evolutionary trends and speciation and such simply by examining changes in allele frequencies throughout populations. In other words, the whole of the Tree of Life (or even just the appearance of the fossil record) cannot be explained or understood on a microevolutionary basis alone.
Creationists get it wrong by stating that macroevolution doesn’t exist, or is impossible; but all too many pro-evolution folks get it wrong by stating that the distinction is meaningless. All too often in these internet “debates”, both sides tend to come off as ignorant, as far as I’m concerned.
<End rant>
My apologies. The prof I had in college always stressed that there was no distinction…that it was merely degrees of change.
-XT
No worries. It’s just one (of many) of my “hot buttons” in these evolution-creation debates. Most of those buttons are against creationist tactics, though, so it’s all good 
I still didn’t see anything in your post that described a real difference between macro and micro, other than macro simply being the accumulation of a bunch of micro, and the semantics that macro refers to those accumulated larger changes.
When someone, like our OP here, says he accepts micro but not macro, it’s honest and accurate to say that macro is not fundamentally different from micro, it’s just more of the same. Wouldn’t you agree?
The problem with ‘changes above the species level’ is that it’s easy for people to misunderstand that such changes can only already have happened. It isn’t possible for a collection of species in, say, the genus Delphinium to suddenly branch off and become a different order, because the order in which they are currently placed was determined by their ancestors.
That’s often the problem - creationists often want to be shown ‘big changes’ happening now, but those only exist today because of (possibly quite small) branching events in the past - and they’re only big now because of the divergence that time has permitted to happen.
Upon re-reading your post, I didn’t pay enough attention to this paragraph. In reading that talkorigins page, I get the idea that there are emergent properties of having a bunch of micro, and to understand macro you need not only to understand micro but also understand the emergent properties that come out.
That is kind of like saying you can’t understand how a microprocessor works by understanding semiconductor physics. But if we had “Intelligent Chip” proponents saying that a microprocessor can’t work by semiconductor physics, I think it would be OK to point out that everything in microprocessor design is fundamentally built upon the underlying physics, that there’s not really a separation, but just differences in how we think of them.
I see where your problem is, it is the same problem that I used to have. You are a rational person, and you are jealous of the benefits provided to science by rationality. People here are pointing out that your ideology cannot accommodate any rational argument at all, and that is difficult for you to hear.
How badly do you want to be rational? There is a price to be paid for rationality, and it includes leaving the childhood fantasies behind. I was once in your situation, trying to reconcile what I had been taught since childhood with what was as plain as the nose on my face. People here are telling you it can’t be done, and I agree with them. I tried to do it for years and couldn’t. You have to pay the price. It’s too high for some, but people that I know that paid it are all glad they did.
Correct. As I said, macro- doesn’t exist without micro-, and even if, upon close scrutiny, macro- is nothing more than a whole lot of accumulated micro-, we don’t have the option of such close crutiny. We are left with a “big picture” in the form of the fossil record coupled with extant organisms. We see trends and biases and differential survivorship among species, or families, or entire phyla when looking through the fossil record, and such are not easily explained when looking from a micro- view. Mass extinctions occur frequently, completely reshaping the tree of life from that point on, for example. And extinctions themselves are not readily explained solely from an adaptationist point of view.
Again, correct. Macroevolution is a big picture view of evolution. It expands beyond the gene-centric view of changing allele frequencies. Scientists such as S. J. Gould have championed the idea that species or higher groups can themselves be considered Darwinian entities subject to selection as a whole, rather than limitng selection solely to the genic or even individual level.
Evolutionary mechanisms such as natural selection, genetic drift, sexual selection and so on are all necessary, but not always sufficient, to explain the history of life. In one sense, microevolution can be thought of as an attempt to answer the question, “What is evolution and how does it work?”, while macroevolution answers the question, “Why does the Tree of Life look the way it does?” In another sense, evolutionary biology represents something of a dichotomy of scale: on the one hand, we have mechanisms and populations and gene flows, and on the other hand, we have evolutionary histories and branching lineages and so on. Microevolution can be thought of as an examination of the former; macroevolution, an examination of the latter.
Sorry for jumping in and out of this thread. Super busy lately and I intend to get around to responding to more of the posts.
I want to quickly address the Genesis account.
Understanding the original mode of the Genesis story shows that is a preamble to what comes next. For example, If I were to say, “The other day I made a ladder and a tree fort. First, I used some wood to make a ladder, and then I made a platform for the treehouse.” You don’t infer that it’s impossible because my first statement suggests I already made the tree fort and later say I made the platform.
Really read Genesis and see what it says. The writer is giving a history. He says, “First the heaven and earth were made, and here’s how it was done.”
First, the earth was without form and void and darkness was on the face of the deep - This is exactly the condition of the universe prior to the big bang. Matter was without form and there was no free flowing light.
And God said let there be light - The very first part of the big bang is that light escaped and filled the universe.
And divided light from the darkness - The light fled the point of the big bang in waves before it stabilized and then began to make matter (darkness).
Using better examples of hebrew - the light was the light of day and the darkness the darkness of night and God called this the first period.
The first matter to form was gas- a fluid (waters) and some of those gasses made suns while others did not. (divide the waters from the waters)
That is the second period.
Third period, we have the creation of a solid from the waters (gasses) which accumulate into the earth. Then the gasses created a water cycle.
Where is the discrepancy?