☢The Theistic Response➼ to Atheists saying, "It Doesn't mean God Did it"

[Tonus]

You see - I grew up in the country-side. Your highly technical talk about them dogs and cows, strewn with all this advanced farming jargon, don't intimidate me, son. But I also paid attention in school

There's the problem, at least in parts of the USA. The pressure from creationists limits a lot of the teaching of evolution so that many teachers --even when they are free to teach the subject-- prefer to steer around it. I think that in my time in school I may have heard the subject broached once or twice and never in any degree of detail. Even in liberal NYC, science/biology teachers seemed to want to avoid the hassle of even mentioning the subject. So for many Americans, our understanding of evolution is whatever snippets we get from TV or --more likely-- from the pulpit.

For a long time, my understanding of evolution was that a species was a stable point along a developmental path, and that transitions were just that-- creatures that were somewhere between point A and point B and not well adapted for anything, requiring a cascade of quick and super-convenient mutations to occur in order to reach point B and avoid extinction. Thus a lizard might birth offspring with feathers instead of scales, and unless successive generations quickly birthed feathered lizards with hollow bones and toothless beaks we would not end up with birds and the lizards would die off. Which is why you see evolution satirized in this manner by people like Ray Comfort. His approach works because it attacks the incorrect version of evolution that many people believe, and not an actual understanding of evolution. The more ignorant people are about a subject the easier it is to compare it to ideas that are insane, and to make the insane ideas appear to be the only viable option.