I think so, but it’d be hard. I’m thinking invocation of possible worlds, some modal logic and …
…and…
…I got bubkis.
I think the problem a lot of creationists have with evolution is the time scale involved. It is easy to show that small changes happen to successive generations of all living things. It is much harder to imagine those changes over the course of a million years. It is especially easy to disbelieve evolution if you think the world is only 10,000 years old. That really isn’t long enough for the process to create what we see.
To show evolution in action today, catch some lightning bugs in a jar and leave them in your room overnight. Next day release all that are still alive. You just selected the bugs best able to survive all night in a jar. That’s the easy part. Now do this every night for a million years. By then you might be able to catch a good light every evening with confidence that they will survive the night.
Much like evolution sometimes it takes a while to make a radical change to one’s belief system and incremental changes is a better approach.
I personally don’t believe in unguided evolution, I can’t see how I could ever, but could see that God could use evolution which opens the door to exploring evolution theory.
YMMV
Thanks to the following for fighting my ignorance: Bryan Ekers, Giles, Trinopus, smiling bandit, John Mace, marshmallow, mac_bolan00, BrainGlutton, Twoflower, Rucksinator, gatorslap, Voyager, Mr. Dribble, shiftless, Mangetout, Mijin, Yumblie, and kanicbird.
A speical thanks to Half Man Half Wit and Princhester for taking the time to craft well-written, lengthier responses.
Follow up question: which science books best explain the process to those who haven’t studied much science?
The Triumph of Evolution: And the Failure of Creationism, by Susan Pearson.
You know, this is not entirely true. I think specifically of a pair of married friends of mine, both of whom were creationists when we met (about 10 years back) and who are now … well, believers is the wrong word – both of whom know accept the theory of evolution as the best extant explanation for the diversity of species and further hold that it would be perverse to deny that without an enormous and improbable input of new information.
For perspective, I also recommend reading the TVTropes page Evolutionary Levels for a review of what evolution is not and how it is often misrepresented in popular media. (Except for X-Men, which is hard science, STFU! :mad:)
Thanks and all, but it’s** MrDibble**.
I recommend The Ancestor’s Tale by Richard Dawkins
I think the biggest issue that most people run into is combining a lot of things into a big clump of “evolution” and, because some small parts of it are still not written in stone, that somehow that whole clump is somehow in dispute. But the most basic principles are pretty easy to understand.
Natural selection is at the heart of it all and it is absolutely indisputable and I don’t even know any creationists who, assuming they understand what it is, think it’s under dispute either. Even ignoring some of the more complex parts like mutations, there are plenty of real-life examples of the principle at work. One I remember well from learning the concept back in high school was about some moths in England that tended to be white prior to the industrial revolution because the white wing pattern blended in with the bark of some tree. After the revolution, those trees became covered with soot, and white wings would stand out and, lo and behold, darker wings started to become more common.
We take advantage of the variations in gene pulls with artificial selection through breeding practices all the time. Dogs are all descended from wolves and yet most modern breeds are on the order of hundreds of years old, compared to the billions that life has been around. The difference there is that the breeding is done by careful selection of humans wherein naturally it occurs through food availability, survival, competition, etc.
I think the real issue that most creationists have is with the other stuff that they lump in with evolution, particularly things like abiogenesis and the big bang. Because they get lumped in with natural selection as “evolution”, and its more those concepts “creation of life” and “creation of the universe” that threaten a lot of religious people as making God “unnecessary”, it naturally carries over to the variations of life. But even then, it’s not hard to imagine that God actually works through natural processes; in fact, as God created nature wouldn’t anything he set up to occur inherently appear to have occurred as a natural process? Or, at worst, could he not have manipulated the odds to ensure that certain events happened at certain times?
That is, ultimately, short of literal belief in a 6 day creation, or some other similar creation story, there is nothing about science that says that conflicts with the existence of a creator. All it does is conflict with particular beliefs that purport to be historical.
I have a problem with this construction. It implies (at least to me) that you’re saying that evolution is teleological – that there is an ultimate aim in store. It also implies that evolution is progressive – that ancestor species were lesser versions of current species, selected against by a process of directed change, akin to human engineering.
Did you mean to imply that?
I think the problem is that it makes Christ unnecessary. No Fall in Eden, no Original Sin, no need for a substituted sacrificial sin-redeemer.
That depends on what one understands the meaning of the Incarnation, Passion, and Resurrection to be. Not all Christians are literalists. Of course, non-literalist Christians – at least the ones I know – don’t have a problem with the the theory of evolution.
Well who knows? The boundaries of philosophy are so woolley you could make a rug out of them but I think it is to some extent an argument that fits within the remit of ontology ie nature of existence etc
And the reason why it’s rejected by religious people the world over is because it reduces the importance of humanity and shatters our arrogance. In most religions humanity plays an important role in the cosmos and the God(s) care about us for some reason. Evolution implies we’re not that relevant, just another animal along for the ride. Kinda like when the Earth went from being the center of creation to just another pebble. This is why one of the most common refutations of evolution is something like “I’m not a monkey’s uncle!” IOW Humans are sacred, not a bunch of damned dirty apes.
There is no evidence for evolution whatsoever.
I don’t wish to junior-mod, but this potentially interesting debate deserves its own thread. Are you up for a debate on this subject, or was the above a drive-by post?
Fair enough, I guess.
On reflection, one philosophical question that can be handled pretty much as a thought experiment, before attempting to investigate whether it pertains to biological diversity is this one:
Can undirected natural forces bring about an increase in order or complexity in any system?
I’m pretty sure that most creationists will answer a firm ‘no’ to this question. They’re wrong, and it’s fairly easy to point out examples of non-living systems where the phenomenon occurs.
I don’t think you even need to go that far; in my experience, they don’t balk at all at the moths or the dog breeding (or, for that matter, at bacteria becoming resistant to antibiotics), but they draw the line at speciation. Never mind abiogenesis or the big bang; like the man said, you maybe just need to hit the “ring species” concept hard enough, quickly going step-by-step through the set-up before throwing in a hypothetical where the interfertile species goes extinct.
Of course, that ‘artificial’ selection is pretty much natural as much as the dog is concerned – to them, we are part of the environment like any other species, or any other natural feature, so the selection pressure we exert through allowing those that exhibit a certain desired trait breed over those that don’t is of the same kind as nature’s. (I’ve also heard it said that the cat’s purr developed purely as an adaptation to their domestication, because it is a sound that humans happen to find pleasant, so cats that produce it were more sought after as pets…)
Heh, I was going to mention the emergence of complexity as a ‘philosophical application’ of evolutionary reasoning…
But there’s another, somewhat related area in which the concept of evolution is important in philosophical thinking, and I think it’s this that causes evolution to be perceived as a threat by certain believers, at least in part: in certain cases, evolutionary arguments can be appealed to to overcome apparent infinite regresses.
What I mean is problems like the following: any chicken’s mother is a chicken. So either no matter how far you go back in time, there must always exist a chicken to be the mother of all chickens to follow, or, at some point, the regress must be broken – there must be a special chicken that exists despite having no mother.
This kind of reasoning is something you often find in arguments purporting to establish the necessity of god’s existence, as an ultimate regression-breaker, such as the first cause or prime mover argument.
The infinite chain of chickens is broken by evolution through realizing that ‘chicken’ is not a sharply defined category: something can start out being firmly non-chicken, and via a feedback process of gradual changes (i.e. evolution) become more and more chicken-like, until it would be unambiguously called ‘chicken’. Similar arguments can be used to break less trivial regress examples, such as, for instance, explaining how consciousness might arise from non-conscious processes (though there’s not really an agreed upon answer to that question at present).
So maybe there is an underlying fear that an argument could be developed that, through appealing to evolutionary reasoning, one might invalidate the arguments for god’s existence that rely on postulating him as a regress-breaker, that causes the flat-out rejection of evolution.
In my opinion, however, believers need not be afraid here: evolutionary arguments only work if we falsely believe there to be a sharp divide between two distinct categories (i.e. ‘chicken’ and ‘not chicken’) where in fact, there is none – but if there actually is a sharp divide, no amount of gradual change can overcome it. So if there is a sharp divide between not existing and existing, as most people probably would hold there is, then there is no way for something to ‘evolve’ into existence.
That doesn’t mean, of course, that the arguments are otherwise sound (or even valid), but at least from this angle, it seems difficult to mount a reasonable attack.
Again, that’s why I think the whole ring species approach is especially well-suited to the “sharp divide” problem: spell out how some "A"s can transition into "B"s (who can still breed with regular "A"s) and how some of those "B"s can transition into "C"s (who can still breed with "B"s, but can’t breed with "A"s). Supply real-world examples – and then postulate the "B"s going extinct like the dinosaur or the dodo: suddenly you’ve got a sharp divide.