Why Christians Attack Evolution

[Esquilax]

I agree that things evolve i.e change and adapt over time. We observe that no doubt.

Hi Disc. I'm going to take your post here seriously- I can't take professor seriously since he doesn't seem to want to engage in discussion- and attempt a point by point analysis, even though I've debunked this stuff numerous times for others. Given this, I rather hope you'll engage too.

But the atheist who is a proponent of the theory of evolution by natural selection is a person of great faith! He does not simply say that things change or adapt over time, but rather that homo sapiens owe their existence to a series of natural processes acting on matter originating from some primordial soup which somehow happened to come into existence in the midst of a chaotic, mindless, unguided, unplanned, cosmos.

Gotta stop you there: you stopped describing evolution after the first sentence. The rest of what you say describes abiogenesis, a separate theory from evolution. It's its own thing, with some pretty good- not slam dunk stuff, but solid- scientific findings that back up that it's possible, sufficient to be the best current scientific conclusion. That's not to say we perfectly accept it, just that the evidence is there.

Meanwhile, the rest of what you say doesn't follow at all; the majority of us atheist will simply stop at "we don't know, but here's what the evidence shows so far." To tell us what we say is hugely presumptuous, not to mention wrong, and you present a false dichotomy; there's no reason a creative agent couldn't have been involved with the universe without being involved in planetary formation or evolution.

I find it interesting that you'd take everyone else to task over claims of knowledge or misrepresenting you, and then in the very next breath you demonstrate a misunderstanding of the science you're trying to discuss, and an attitude about what atheists think of origins that doesn't reflect any of our views. Please try and stick to the facts, in future.

The proponent of said theory asks me to believe something that is so improbable ......

This is an argument from personal incredulity, and hence fallacious. More importantly, have you done any calculations of probability, to come to the conclusion that the above is improbable? What comparisons were you able to make, given that you have a sample size of one?

Well just read:

This idea that evolution could have occurred without an intelligent Designer is so improbable as to be fantastic. This has been demonstrated by Barrow and Tipler in their book The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. In this book, they list ten steps in the course of human evolution, each of which is so improbable that before it would have occurred the sun would have ceased to be a main sequence star and would have burned up the earth. They estimate the odds of the evolution of the human genome by chance to be on the order of 4-360 (110,000), a number which is so huge that to call it astronomical would be a wild understatement. In other words, if evolution did occur, it would have been a miracle, so that evolution is actually evidence for the existence of God! And here the Christian can be much more open to where the evidence leads. He could say, "Well, God could have used evolution; He could have used special creation. I'm open to the evidence." But, you see, for the naturalist evolution is the only game in town! No matter how fantastic the odds, no matter how improbable the evidence, he's stuck with it because he hasn't got an intelligent Designer. So it seems to me that the Christian can be far more objective on this point. (Portion of a debate transcript, University of Georgia, Athens, Georgia, United States – 1998 - Dr. William Lane Craig)

William Lane Craig isn't particularly well regarded among atheists, for the simple reason that he's... well, something of a charlatan when it comes to debate. You're going to need to do better than that. More importantly, his argument here is, again, an argument from incredulity, made especially ridiculous because we can see evolution happening today. The fact that he phrases it as something that happened in the past tense leads me to believe that, again, we're discussing abiogenesis and not evolution, an area of science that still isn't perfectly understood. There's simply no way to calculate the probability of such things, as Craig claims to have happened, because the initial conditions of the earth, and all the ways an abiogenetic event might be possible, simply are not known. Any calculation hence made is being done with incomplete data, the kind that real scientists without an ideological bias simply would not publish as representative of the facts.