How many threads are or have been active on this subject in this last 6 weeks? Ten? Each one comes at it from a minutely different angle than the others, then they all come down to the same thing. Which is: educated people giving reams and reams of information explaining to creationists how and why evolution is a reality, has been proven repeatedly, and in true scientific circles, no debate about the fact of it even exists. The particulars of how it occured, yes. The fact of it occuring is not in dispute, and has not been for a very long time.
On the other side, we have creationists. They pose ridiculous questions, make meaningless assertions, and brush aside everything they can’t explain with a “God made it that way, we can’t know why.” (Let us not forget that, for the most part it appears that most of the believers here do not dispute evolution, they simply accept what is obvious: if God created the earth and all life in it, he apparantly used the mechanism of evolution.)
Why does this debate even exist? Well, the answer lies in another thread question here in Great Debates: why do the religious feel the need to bring others to their belief while atheists do not?
Insecurity.
Here’s the question we must ask when viewing the debate dispassionately: who has an axe to grind? Who has an agenda? Who needs to prove that what they believe is true? Well, there’s no question that the fundamentalist believers do! They preach, proselytize, condemn, judge, etc. They are very concerned with making as many people as possible believe as they do. If they can convince anyone that separate creation is true, that bolsters their belief system, and they are always concerned with everything that bolsters their belief system, and hostile to anything which appears to threaten it.
Do the evolutionists have an agenda? No. People who accept evolution have zero need or reason to persuade anyone, except in the service of reducing the ignorance in the world. But the evolution scientists themselves don’t have any real agenda, apart from the quest for knowledge, like all scientists. They aren’t preaching any religion, they don’t need to have a belief system bolstered, all they want is to understand and explain. There is no particular truth they want, they have no desire for the facts to fit any preconceived notion, they simply want as many facts as they can get. They want as much truth to be revealed as possible. And of course, if they are the revealers of new truth, they will get accolades and career boosts. But not by proving anything preconceived! They only “win” by revealing what IS, not what ANYONE wants to be. And has been pointed out previously, the original evolution scientists were themselves Christian, and had no desire to prove that God did not exist, they simply sought to understand how He did what He did. And many of todays are also believers. They just don’t let that make them ignorant.
This being the case, who has the more trustworthy argument? Who is the more believable advocate? Who is more likely to have truth? The ones who need you to believe with them? The ones who are threatened by information that doesn’t (they THINK) support thier beliefs? The ones who are on a campaign to make others think as they do? Or the ones who are simply trying to increase the understanding and knowledge of the whole human race, without any preconceived ideas of what the answers may be?
It’s kinda like witnesses in a murder trial; who ya gonna believe: the accused found with the bloody knife in his hand, or the innocent bystanding witnesses and forensic scientists?
Well, guess what: OJ was guilty.
So we can stop arguing now that I have laid out who is full of it.
Thank you, and good night.
I am #1. Everyone else is #2 or lower.
I used to have a copy, but alas, no more.