Way back in post 185, someone repeated this oldie goldie:
"Evolution is a fairy tale. It takes just as much faith to believe in evolution as it does to believe that God created the world as described in Genesis."I was going to let it go, but I can't. It's probably futile, but one of the reasons we're here is to bring some scientific enlightenment to the lurkers.
In discussions like this, we should be careful about our terminology, so that we're all using words in the same way. One can "believe" in the existence of the tooth fairy, but one does not -- in the same sense of the word -- "believe" in the existence of his own mother. Belief in the first proposition (tooth fairy) requires faith, which is the belief in something for which there is no evidence or logical proof. The second proposition (mother) is the kind of knowledge which follows from sensory evidence. There is also that kind of knowledge (like the Pythagorean theorem) which follows from logical proof. In either case, that is, belief in things evidenced by sensory evidence or demonstrated by logical proof, there is no need for faith.
In between mother and the Pythagorean theorem are those propositions we provisionally accept (or in common usage "believe"), like relativity and evolution, because they are scientific theories -- logical and falsifiable explanations of the available data (which data is knowledge obtained via sensory evidence).
Too many creationists come into these threads and appear to be clueless about the vital distinctions between reason and faith. There are vitally significant differences between an axiom and an article of dogma, fact and fantasy, hypothesis (or a more general theory) from conjecture. These fundamentals allow us to distinguish reason-based science from faith-based teaching.
Useful website in this context: Do You Believe in Evolution?
Well said.
My bumper-sticker version of that point is, "it doesn't take 'faith' to believe in evolution -- it takes evidence and understanding."