You haven't lost the knack, have you Dan S de Merengue. Obfuscation is your trade, and you're not afraid to use it.

>>“I don't have any.” That is, you admit its pretty difficult to display any facts about evolution<<

As I said - quite clearly, I thought - the basic facts are not at issue, only the interpretation that you put upon them. Facts that underpin theories on evolution include a vast array of factual discoveries - rock formations, fossils, bones, that sort of stuff. You choose to ignore the conclusions that are made, using these facts, by the previously mentioned anthropologists, archaeologists, ethnologists, geologists, paleontologists, paleozoologists and paleobotanists etc.

>>Yet our theories differ, along with our presuppositions<<

Of course, if you start with the presupposition that there is a God who made everything from scratch, in six days, then it is almost inevitable that you will conclude "from the evidence" that God made everything from scratch in six days. Unless you burst out laughing half way through at the absurdity of it all, of course. In which case all bets would be off, and you would be able to look at the facts again without the burden of your pre-formed conclusion.

My "presupposition", such that it is, is that no-one has remotely begun to persuade me that a Supreme Being exists - let alone the precise one that guides all your theories. As a result, I am able to open my mind to the arguments of the various scientists who understand the physical evidence far better than I, and evaluate their theories accordingly.

It is really a matter of where you start. If you start with the physical evidence alone, there is no chance whatsoever that you would reach the conclusion that "hey, God did it all. And in six days. Wow."

>>You claim that there is no evidence for God. That is, after spending a fair amount of your effort arguing against the evidence that was put before you<<

I don't argue against the evidence, only that it represents "evidence for God". Of which, there is precisely none.

SM,
Dawkins contends that we shouldn't invoke a 'god of the gaps' to fill a void wherever our knowledge is incomplete. Yet it's no simpler to say, “therefore God must have done it” than to say, “therefore evolution must have done it”. Both can be a simplistic jump. Filling in the knowledge gap with 'evolution' is just another variation of 'god of the gaps'.

The important question is which theory more completely accounts for the facts.

You speak of someone finding something that is impossible to have evolved without an outside hand. These are words reminiscent of Darwin (presumably you think he was a “real” scientist with a testable hypothesis) who famously said that, “If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down.”

The hypothesis of any “real” scientist can be disproven. ID proponents believe that Darwin's statement can and has been put to the test, and his theory's failure can be demonstrated in biology using measures such as 'irreducible complexity', which has its basis in what we know, not what we don't know.

For example, last week I had the rare pleasure of driving through a national park in Cameroon and saw giraffes up close in the wild.

The giraffe's anatomy and physiology are tightly intertwined as a single functional unit. For the giraffe to get it's long neck by mutation requires associated changes throughout it's body before it's neck is functional: long legs, face, tongue, prehensile lips, specialised knee joints and blood flow system to pump blood to the giraffe's distant brain.  It would require hundreds or thousands of almost simultaneous mutations, a set of events that, for all practical purposes, has a probability of zero.

Pericles,
Yes, what you said was quite clear:

“... apparently it's my turn to present some "facts" about evolution.
Sorry to disappoint you, but I don't have any.” (Pericles,16/12)

The invitation remains.

But once again, there's much I can agree with in your last post. The facts are the facts. Facts by definition are those things which are indisputable: the “rock formations, fossils, bones, that sort of stuff.” And how you view the implications of those facts does indeed depend much on your starting presuppositions.

Conclusions are drawn by the geologists, archaeologists, paleontologists, etc. from evidence based on facts. However, you and I (and they themselves) dispute the conclusions. All these experts don't exactly speak as one, do they? Their conclusions are often in dispute and differ among themselves.

When you speak of the “pre-formed conclusion”, I think you're hitting the nail on the head. Many people have relegated evolution to the only possible conclusion before they begin, and have not stopped to consider the alternative. Stop momentarily and consider you own biases (stated and unstated).

The bias against God shown from this evolutionary biologist, Richard Lewontin, was quite explicit-

“We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.

“It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is an absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.”

As you said (Pericles,16/12), people “fit facts into theories”, more so than it being the other way around.

Saltpetre,
My intention was to answer some specific questions or objections. After this, how you formulate your beliefs is up to you and your conscience, “delusory”, “troubled”, or otherwise.

It's normal in science to modify hypotheses. Revising a disproven hypothesis is how knowledge advances. Yet for creationists, their overall approach to genetics has not altered or needed to alter in decades.

Much variation arising from just two individuals is quite possible. Just look at a family near you with numerous children. Among my mum's brothers and sisters there's quite a variation in height, eye and skin colour, straight and curly hair. This variation is the normal result of recombination of genetic information present in the parents.

It works similarly for any population, humans, plants or animals. The evidence is quite consistent with the statement from Genesis, when God was 'very busy' (in the initial six days) creating distinct kinds of organisms to reproduce “after their kind”. For example, a hypothetical 'dog kind' could vary by recombination, giving rise to wolf, coyote, dingo and so forth, while all still remaining dogs.

Natural selection can 'cull and sort' the genetic information leading to such large differences in the resulting offspring to warrant certain strains being called new species. In the same way, the original elephant kind may have been 'split' into African elephant, Indian elephant, mammoth and mastodon. Yet, as I explained to Pericles, such variations, though commonly observed do not involve increasing genetic information, such as is required by evolution to proceed from the lower life forms to the higher.

In the context of genetics, by 'other factors' I was largely referring to mutations. Many mutational defects are known in humans by the inherited diseases they cause, such as sickle cell anaemia and cystic fibrosis.

Though not all mutations cause such immediate harm (mutations are often carried in the body without deleterious effect), evolutionists have difficulty pointing to examples of mutations bringing 'upward' constructive evolution. So yes, assigning a creative role to mutations is a “leap of faith too far”.

Dan,

".. evolutionists have difficulty pointing to examples of mutations bringing 'upward' constructive evolution."

So, you would try to have us believe (to take just one example) that all of the planet's mammalian species have co-existed in one form or another since time immemorial - that against all scientific evidence the monotremes (egg-laying mammals) do not represent a link from an ancestral reptile, that marsupials do not represent the next link upwards in the evolution of mammals, and finally that the placental mammals do not complete the direct evolutionary line of ascendancy, but have rather materialised through divine intervention?

The line of evolution is clear. Ancestral mammals, like the giant marsupials, have been progressively replaced by the more highly evolved placental mammals, with the lower mammalian species only remaining in isolated pockets and island continents like Australia. In Aus, the macropods are our equivalent of the antellope and deer species of Asia, Africa and the Americas, the Thylacine was our equivalent of the European Wolf, the Tassie Devil our equivalent of the Hyena. These are not examples of parallel evolution but of direct evolution.

You would dispute scientific evidence that the whales have actually evolved from land-living forebears, or that modern day lungfish are descended from forebears which gave rise to amphibians and thence to reptiles?

I can't imagine what your explanation could be for the emergence of all current plant and animal species post the mass extinction event 65 million years ago which wiped out the dinosaurs - but somehow didn't do the same to the monkeys or the platypus? (Surely we're not stuck on the 6,000 year old Earth - since we are told even the Australian Aborigines have been in Aus for 30-40,000 years already.) I suppose then that God just created a whole new set?

One doesn't even have to refer to the fossil record - comprehensive representation of most plant and animal evolutionary paths can be found today - for those who care to look. Why, even the development of the human embryo and foetus clearly demonstrates our early reptilian origins.

You are still ignoring the massive elephant in the closed room of your argument, Dan S de Merengue. As well you know.

>>Many people have relegated evolution to the only possible conclusion before they begin, and have not stopped to consider the alternative.<<

What alternative?

And by that, I mean an alternative that does not pre-suppose the existence of a deity.

In your case, specifically the variant of the Christian God that you assume exists, before you look at your first fossil. Because (and you know this perfectly well, yet you continue to deny it) there isn't the remotest possibility that you could deduce the existence of your God from the facts - fossils etc. - that we both agree upon.

At the same time, it is a perfectly respectable deduction from the facts - that we both agree upon - that life on earth has evolved largely in line with the theories of the evolutionists.

Your Richard Lewontin quote was a little cheeky. As you are aware, given that you selected the quote, he was referring to sociobiology, not evolution.

Here is a far more typical Lewontin observation:

"The continued appeal of a story of a divine creation of human life is that it provides, for those for whom the ordinary experience of living does not, a seductive relief from what Eric Fromm called the Anxiety of Meaninglessness. The rest is commentary."

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2005/oct/20/the-wars-over-evolution/?pagination=false

I particularly like the tag line "the rest is commentary".

But this we can always agree upon:

>>All these experts don't exactly speak as one, do they? Their conclusions are often in dispute and differ among themselves<<

There is one elephantine exception to this rule: closed-loop young-earth creationists cannot budge from their predetermined conclusions, however much more evidence is produced - as it will be, and as it will be argued over - in the future.