(June 26, 2015 at 9:57 am)Brian37 Wrote: Don't feed the fundies. When you say "The origins of life are not completely understood" what the sky hero fan hears is "AH HA, see you admit you don't know so I can fill in that gap with fiction".
I am willing to be honest with them, even if the end result is that they are not honest with themselves. Also, OPs like this one make me think that the person is trying to make a point of some kind, and I prefer not to jump the gun. It's better to let them spring their intellectual trap in full confidence, even if it's just going to be an argument that we've seen (and beaten into the ground) many times before.
"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
