I find it amusing that people are still trying to discredit Darwin who had the most rudimentary idea of how evolution worked. That field of study was literally in its infancy at the time. Of course you're going to be able to find flaws with it. Young earth creationists seem to think that if they can find a flaw in Darwin's ideas that somehow that discredits the whole idea.
I try not to promote evolution because of the way some people take it to hurt their faith or to take the philosophy that it means we're not different from other animals. A lot of people think that accepting evolution makes you an atheist. One of the most frustrating things in dealing with other human beings is that you can say one thing but people will add several meanings to what you say that you never actually said.
For example if I were to say that I accept the theory of evolution as valid science, people have a tendency to jump to all sorts of unfounded conclusions about me and what I think and believe. It's extremely frustrating and I get tired of spending half the conversation trying to defend myself or dispel these wrong assumptions.
Another problem I run into is that people scream "there is no evidence!" and then they will not accept any evidence shown at all. No matter how thorough, compelling, or strong the evidence is, they continue to scream that there's no evidence because they have decided beforehand that there can not be any evidence.
One of those unfounded assumptions comes into play and that's that, if they accept evolution, they automatically have to abandon the Bible. I don't agree with that at all. However, this false belief causes a lot of emotional resistance to the idea that gets in the way of a clear-headed and unbiased evaluation of evidence.
Until people can get over that and be willing to accept what the evidence leads them to rather than coming to conclusions beforehand, then any argument is pretty much futile.
"Some species considered by the Evolutionists as long extinct and therefore used to 'date the strata in which they are found, are still existing today. The coelacanth fish was supposed by the Evolutionists to have disappeared with the dinosaur 'sixty million' years ago; and coelacanth fossils found in rock beds were used as conclusive evidence that the beds are sixty million years old. But recently it was learned, to the consternation of the savants, that this fish was very much alive, and could be found in abundance off the coast of Madagascar, where the natives had been fishing for it all their lives. The experts are still puzzling over the 'colossal riddle' of how the coelacanth survived 'so long.' So, during all the decades in which the savants had been classifying this fish with the dinosaur and 'identifying' by it the age of rocks, the natives had been catching it and using its hard scales to roughen-up punctured bicycle tubes for patching. Who was more educated: the Madagascar native, who did not know of Evolution, or the Evolutionists who had believed that this fish 'had been the direct ancestor of Man'? It reminds me of the camel bones discovered in a midwestern state of the United States, and the scientific theories which were built on them; until an old metal tag was found nearby with the inscription 'U.S. Army.' Then it was finally revealed that the camels were imported by the War Department during the Civil War. Are these not isolated exceptions? No. Many of the supposedly long-extinct species
are commonly found today. They are identical with the fossil species in everything but the most minor variations; which variations are no more significant than the variations found in the same species in different localities. But the evolutionary geologists prefer to make the most out of these variations, for they wish to classify the fossils as extinct and prehistoric species, in order to bolster up their theory of the 'age' of the rocks....A gigantic hoax underlies this whole system, which has entirely distorted the subject of geology. The Evolutionists claim the development of higher or more complex organisms from the lower or more simple organisms. (In this they contradict themselves hopelessly, for they at the same time claim that the huge and superdeveloped animals like the dinosaur lived only in the most 'distant' ages.) One of the chief bulwarks of their theory has always been the classification of the rock strata. Thus, they claimed to find the simple or 'early' forms of life in the 'early' strata, and the complex or 'recent' forms of life in the 'recent' strata. But in this lies their fraud:
there are no characteristics by which to identify or 'date' the strata, except the fossils. When they have fossils which they find convenient to their system to classify as 'early', they thereupon
use the fossils to identify the age of the strata containing these fossils. But, thereafter, any fossils which will be found in this stratum are 'proved' to be 'early' by the fact that they are found in the 'early stratum.' This plain deception is the main foundation of evolutionary geology. Many of the fossils classified as 'early'
are not even extinct; and are to be found, with slight local variations, alive today. The fossils are not found in a uniformly 'ascending' system of layers, as the uninitiated layman is led to believe, with simple forms of life at the bottom (including the huge animals, although how they fit into the 'old' beds instead of the 'recent' beds I am at a loss to know) and the complex forms in the upper layers. For the 'early' fossils are found also in the topmost beds, and 'recent' fossils are also found in the lower beds. Also note that the geologists depict the earth's crust as an orderly, uniform system of beds lying on top of each other like a layer cake one hundred miles deep. But the truth is very far from this. Even according to their 'classification' methods, such a system of successive strata is found nowhere in the world except in their textbooks and their imagination. The deepest system of layers on earth is no more than three miles in depth, and in most places only a mere fraction of this depth exists. What these theorists have done, is this: The strata found in various localities are classified as being of various ages; then they add up all the strata of the world's crust to a hundred-mile deep system representing an enormous total of time. The plain truth is that these strata of the various localities are all shallow, and all are more or less contemporaneous. Then the evidence of the rocks is of no help to Evolution; on the contrary, the fact that some beds contain both simple and complex forms of life is evidence against their theory. They advance another argument, which is really a reproach to common sense. This is called: the ascending order of the species. The fact that the various species can be arranged in a certain order of ascending complexity is no more meaningful than the fact that a silver dollar, a half dollar, a quarter and a dime can be arranged in ascending order. We do not therefore arrive at the conclusion that the dime was minted earlier and the dollar was minted last; and surely no one concludes therefrom that the dollar 'developed' or evolved from the dime." ---Rabbi Avigdor Miller, Rejoice O Youth!, pp. 27-28
Topic: Appendix Evolved Over 30 Times, May Perform Useful Function, Researchers Say (Read 4488 times)