I only bothered to post the link because someone had the foolishness to say that there is no controversy regarding evolution among scientists.
But no matter how many
creationist sites that you link that say otherwise, there is no serious and significant scientific controversy concerning either the occurrence of evolution or the age of the earth.
That was the point. Your reply was less refutation of that point than it was confirmation.
I think it interesting that scientists are no longer regarded as such as soon as they have identified that they don't tow the party line.
Who said they aren't scientists?
However, it's important to note that these scientists are extremely few in number (especially if we refine the scope of our inquiry to include only scientists who work in fields directly relevant to evolution) and they are virtually all fundamentalist Christians who dispute evolution on theological grounds which they try to dress up as science.
Since atheism runs rampant among scientists, as it does in most professions which emphasize logic and reason, perhaps if you could locate a few dozen atheist scientists who believe in creationism you'd have something to hang your hat on. Since I can find any number of scientists who are Christian and who also believe unreservedly in the truth of evolution and since ID theory (the most popular brandname for "creationism" at the moment) does not posit a god, per se, as the creator, this does not appear to be an unreasonable request.
I actually don't care if there are five scientists or five hundred who have identified themselves as doubting Darwinian evolution. I wouldn't trust evolution if there were zero.
That's a candid admission on your part. You wouldn't "trust" (interesting word choice, BTW) evolution because your real concerns, like those of sntjohnny, are not scientific in nature. They are theological. You don't "trust" evolution because you are concerned by the threat that you perceive evolution poses to your worldview.
This is why you need to show that your method of "knowing," whatever it is, is more likely to lead to reliable knowledge than are those methods used by science. And that's something neither of you -- nor anyone else in the world -- has been able to do.
Your position comes down to faith, not reason. You have faith that your particular invisible god exists and that he created the world and all its inhabitants as we see them today. This is the first premise in your argument that you say shows evolution to be false. It's this very first premise of yours that is disputed. If your god exists, demonstrate it. If you do, then we can try to determine for what it is responsible and for what it is not.
But don't put the horse before the cart.
There has been an argument here that we should trust the conclusions of those more knowledgeable than ourselves.
No, that is a misunderstanding of what has been argued. The argument is that we ought to believe that the conclusions formed by a method for obtaining knowledge about the world (a method which has been proven more reliable than any other method known to Man) are probably true in the absence of very powerful evidence to the contrary.
You believe that we ought to make an exception to this belief in the case of evolution because evolution runs counter to your religious faith. Unfortunately, you've provided no reason to believe that the method by which you've come to your conclusions is reliable. Hoping or desiring that some proposition or other is true is not a good reason to believe that the proposition is actually true.
The "truths" expressed about the origin of species found in a two-to-three-thousand-year-old book are no more likely to be accurate than are the "truths" found in Ptolemy's astronomy charts or Galen's theories on the human anatomy.
We simply know more about the world today than that which we knew two thousand years ago. We'll know more two thousand years from now than that which we know today. Science accounts for this; religion doesn't.
Continuously throughout my life, I have learned that knowledge does not imply honesty and that it does not imply correctness (is correctness a word?). When I say honesty, I am not necessarily meaning that a person is knowingly lying. Often, people pass on false information because they misunderstood the truth due to a bias. Why, when evaluating historical evidence, are elite scientists above such an error? Yes, even most elite scientists... Biases have a way of giving a consistent color to the information you take in.
Are the theories of atoms, light, gravity, relativity, electricity, heliocentricity, quantum mechanics, etc., all unduly influenced by this bias and therefore all incorrect? Or does this bias just show up in theories that you perceive to contradict your faith?
If it's the latter, then I assume the readers of this thread will figure out with whom the real bias lies.
Since science is ultra-competitive, why is support for the theory of evolution almost unanimous among elite scientists if they all know that theory is riddled with error?
Since scientists are very well aware that whomever among them shows the theory of evolution to be mistaken will go down in history beside Newton, Darwin, and Einstein as one of the greatest scientists who ever lived, why would they all selflessly forego this fame and adulation to toe the party line?
The claims of bias and collusion are unreasonable claims.
If a person approaches evidence saying "Well, now, how did this get here?" with the bias that nothing outside nature could have caused it, why on earth would it be shocking that his conclusion is that nothing outside of nature caused it?
Don't you think it might be a good idea if we first show that something actually
exists outside of nature before we begin to attribute acts to it?
