(November 26, 2016 at 5:46 am)robvalue Wrote: I see he's started conflating evolution with abiogenesis now.
There is a reason that creationists often do that. Remember that the creation account explains both the origin of life (god did it) and the diversity of life (god did it). Evolution calls this into question, because if life did not suddenly pop into existence all at once and fully formed then it wasn't created. To them, evolution is an attempt to replace creation as the cause of all the living things we see and therefore must explain how life itself began in order to do so.
To those who understand what the theory of evolution is meant to explain, these are two separate issues. To the creationist, they are inextricably linked.
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould
