(April 11, 2014 at 11:36 pm)Deidre32 Wrote: Understand. But, why is it essential for Christians to perpetuate this myth that evolution is a falsehood?Because it's what they are taught and they are certain that it makes no sense, and that the only way that anyone else believes it is because they are ignorant or mislead. Anytime I see the arguments against evolution I can easily see my former self making them and finding zero objections among my religious colleagues of any faith. That it seems to be such a universal attitude among people of varying faiths and denominations makes it that much more of a certainty for them.
It may be one of the most effective bubbles I've ever experienced from the inside and seen from the outside. Lacking (or simply not accepting) the understanding of evolution works and how time scales factor in makes the idea of macro-evolution easy to dismiss and extremely difficult to even consider.
"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
