Help Me Understand

[robvalue]

Although evolution is an incredibly complex subject in its entirety, the basics of it are very simple.

1) Small changes happen (we see this all the time, people and animals are similar but different from their parents).

2) Those changes which give some small advantage for survival in whatever the current environment is will be favoured, because such animals will live longer and have more chance to produce offspring. This will move the "averages" in that direction.

3) A lot of small changes, over a very long time, add up to big changes.

People who don't understand it generally fall flat at the bolded part. We're talking hundreds of thousands of generations, at least, before you see any obvious big changes. I understand it is hard for the human mind to think in such long time spans when we are ourselves only here for a century or less. Also, people who say "evolution says dogs give birth to cats" don't have the slightest clue at all what evolution is. It would me like me saying Jesus was a roller coaster in Essex. Yes, what you think is evolution is false; but that's because it's not evolution. It's your misinformed ideas about evolution.

Really, that's all there is. To me it's incredibly obvious that this is the only sensible explanation. Evolution happens. We know it happens. Picking holes in the theory of evolution is not the same as picking holes in evolution. Our models are never going to be perfect, we work on them all the time to improve them.

It's also a huge jump from picking holes in the theory of evolution to rejecting not just the theory but evolution itself, and jumping instead to "magic". It's all kinds of logical fallacies including non-sequitur, magical thinking, false dichotomy, argument from ignorance/incredulity and simply giving up on science and reality. The correct scientific response would be "let's see if we can improve this model to account for these apparent problems" or "let's try and find another sensible explanation and build a new testable hypothesis".

If there was enough evidence to discount the whole of the theory of evolution, someone is keeping it tightly under lock and key because there would be immense fame for anyone who could produce it and the internet would be rife with it.

The Catholic approach seems to be "Science has it right, but god did science". It is an unnecessary assumption which explains nothing, as I pointed out in my other thread, and has no logical basis. The only step missing is abiogenesis (which people who don't understand evolution often mix up with evolution) which science isn't far from understanding. This is the only gap for magic to be inserted, and is so far removed from actual religious accounts that it's absurd. It's suggesting an all powerful god took the most laborious, inefficient, risky, long whinded, painful, pointless method to do something he could have done instantly (like the holy texts said he did). Sure, he "could have" done that; argument from ignorance. If you understand evolution, you understand it doesn't need any external guidance. We are not the "goal" of evolution, we are just what happened. Anything else is rationalizations after the fact.