For the record, I don’t have any strong ideas for or against a young earth or old earth or for theistic evolution. However, I think a young earth view and special creation of the creatures has a prima facie validity from Scripture and tradition.
Having said that, take a look at this Ida (Darwinius Masillae) for yourself and tell me whether that really looks like a “missing link” (supposing that is saying anything meaningful). For one thing, it’s not even a link between apes and humans. At best, it’s a link between lemurs and anthropoid like apes.
Simply because Ida lacks a tooth comb and a grooming claw, this is supposed to make it “the Holy Grail” of our transition from lemurs to apes?
I have to say, the evidence is underwhelming. The fact is, connecting the dots with fossils is 95% pure imagination and creativity. The other 5% is having a PhD in a relevant field so that the general public will swallow your story.
Check out this article by Scientific American for a more level headed analysis:
Weak Link: Fossil Darwinius Has Its 15 Minutes: Scientific American
Maggie said,
Evolution is callede THEORY of Evolution because it cannot be proven.
The other commenter, Chris, is sort of right about this one. In science, everything is a theory. Nothing can be “proven” in technical terms (which simply means with deductive certainty) because science uses the method of induction, not deduction.
The fact that a thing is a theory doesn’t mean we don’t have excellent reasons for believing it. Gravity is in fact still a theory. But it’s a theory I’d stake my life on under the right conditions.
Chris said,
Evolution is a theory in the same sense that gravity is a theory...
They are both theories, but not in the same sense. We have direct observational evidence for the theory of gravity. We don’t have anything like this for the theory of evolution.
We can see solid evidence, repeated through-out history by looking at fossils which can be dated and also by examining DNA structures.
In fact, it’s not so simple. There isn’t a straight line of evidence from the fossil record or from DNA. There is a lot of imaginative story telling in between the evidence. It’s more like dotted lines filled in with “just so” stories.
As Alex Rosenberg observes, “It may seem a simple matter to state the logical relationship between the evidence that Scientists amass and the hypotheses the evidence tests. But philosophers of science have discovered that testing hypotheses is by no means an easily understood matter… At most, empirical evidence supports a hypothesis to some degree. But as we shall see, it may also support many other hypotheses to an equal degree… When the hypothesis under test is not a single statement like ‘All swans are white’ but a system of highly theoretical claims like the kinetic theory of gases, it is open to the theorist to make one or more of a large number of changes in the theory in light of a falsifying test, any one of which will reconcile the theory with the data… In short, theory is underdetermined by observation” (Philosophy of Science 2nd ed. 117, 139).
And so Godfrey-Smith, “Empiricists argue that there will always be a range of alternative theories compatible with all our actual evidence, and maybe a range of alternative theories compatible with all our possible evidence” (Theory and Reality 181).
Of course, there are many things which scientists use to help them select one theory over another. But let’s not be naïve and think this is a purely objective affair. The fact is, presuppositions, religious and anti-religious biases, politics, and social pressures play a much bigger role in scientific theorizing than anyone wants to admit nowadays.
As Richard Lewontin incrimatingly admitted, “Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. 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 absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door. The eminent Kant scholar Lewis Beck used to say that anyone who could believe in God could believe in anything. To appeal to an omnipotent deity is to allow that at any moment the regularities of nature may be ruptured, that miracles may happen.
RICHARD LEWONTIN: Billions and Billions of Demons
And if anyone thinks this doesn’t come into play in the realm of evolution, which as Dawkins (I believe) said, makes it intellectually respectable to be an atheist, they are only fooling themselves.
So how does all this scientific dogma arise about how you’d have to be an idiot to deny evolution etc. etc.? Well that’s easy. Scientists are the new priests and, nowadays, everyone (including the Christian) is part of their congregation.
“In the present euphoria about the wonders of science you find many scientists, individually and in groups, arrogating to themselves rights that do not strictly flow from their scientific competence. They pass high judgements on … God and man, on good and evil, on culture and justice, and on the deepest issues of human destiny. And their prestige as scientists, which is in no doubt whatever, illicitly carries over in the mind of the public to these extrascientific pronouncements” (Charles Malik, “The Limitations of Natural Science,” 385).
