Fact, Fable, and Darwin (If you haven't read this already, you should!!!)

I write as neither a creationist nor a Darwinist, but as one who knows what is probably the most disreputable scientific secret of the past century: There is no plausible scientific theory of the origin of species! Darwin himself was not sure he had produced one, and for many decades every competent evolutionary biologist has known that he did not. Although the experts have kept quiet when true believers have sworn in court and before legislative bodies that Darwin's theory is proven beyond any possible doubt, that's not what reputable biologists, including committed Darwinians, have been saying to one another.

Without question, Charles Darwin would be among the most prominent biologists in history even if he hadn't written The Origin of Species in 1859. But he would not have been deified in the campaign to "enlighten" humanity. The battle over evolution is not an example of how heroic scientists have withstood the relentless persecution of religious fanatics. Rather, from the very start it primarily has been an attack on religion by militant atheists who wrap themselves in the mantle of science.

When a thoroughly ideological Darwinist like Richard Dawkins claims, "The theory is about as much in doubt as that the earth goes round the sun," he does not state a fact, but merely aims to discredit a priori anyone who dares to express reservations about evolution. Indeed, Dawkins has written, "It is absolutely safe to say that, if you meet somebody who claims not to believe in evolution, that person is ignorant, stupid, or insane...."

That is precisely how "Darwin's Bulldog," Thomas Huxley, hoped intellectuals would react when he first adopted the tactic of claiming that the only choice is between Darwin and Bible literalism. However, just as one can doubt Max Weber's Protestant Ethic thesis without thereby declaring for Marxism, so too one may note the serious shortcomings of neo-Darwinism without opting for any rival theory. Modern physics provides a model of how science benefits from being willing to live with open questions rather than embracing obviously flawed conjectures.

What is most clear to me is that the Darwinian Crusade does not prove some basic incompatibility between religion and science. But the even more immediate reality is that Darwin's theory falls noticeably short of explaining the origin of species. Dawkins knows the many serious problems that beset a purely materialistic evolutionary theory, but asserts that no one except true believers in evolution can be allowed into the discussion, which also must be held in secret. Thus he chastises Niles Eldridge and Stephen Jay Gould, two distinguished fellow Darwinians, for giving "spurious aid and comfort to modern creationists."

Dawkins believes that, regardless of his or her good intentions, "if a reputable scholar breathes so much as a hint of criticism of some detail of Darwinian theory, that fact is seized upon and blown up out of proportion." While acknowledging that "the extreme rarity of transitional forms in the fossil record" is a major embarrassment for Darwinism, Stephen Jay Gould confided that this has been held as a "trade secret of paleontology" and acknowledged that the evolutionary diagrams "that adorn our textbooks" are based on "inference...not the evidence of fossils."

According to Steven Stanley, another distinguished evolutionist, doubts raised by the fossil record were "suppressed" for years. Stanley noted that this too was a tactic begun by Huxley, always careful not to reveal his own serious misgivings in public. Paleontologist Niles Eldridge and his colleagues have said that the history of life demonstrates gradual transformations of species, "all the while really knowing that it does not." This is not how science is conducted; it is how ideological crusades are run.

By Darwin's day it had long been recognized that the fossil evidence showed that there had been a progression in the biological complexity of organisms over an immense period of time. In the oldest strata, only simple organisms are observed. In more recent strata, more complex organisms appear. The biological world is now classified into a set of nested categories. Within each genus (mammals, reptiles, etc.) are species (dogs, horses, elephants, etc.) and within each species are many specific varieties, or breeds (Great Dane, Poodle, Beagle, etc.).

It was well-known that selective breeding can create variations within species. But the boundaries between species are distinct and firm--one species does not simply trail off into another by degrees. As Darwin acknowledged, breeding experiments reveal clear limits to selective breeding beyond which no additional changes can be produced. For example, dogs can be bred to be only so big and no bigger, let alone be selectively bred until they are cats. Hence, the question of where species come from was the real challenge and, despite the title of his famous book and more than a century of hoopla and celebration, Darwin essentially left it unanswered.

After many years spent searching for an adequate explanation of the origin of species, in the end Darwin fell back on natural selection, claiming that it could create new creatures too, if given im-mense periods of time. That is, organisms respond to their environmental circumstances by slowly changing (evolving) in the direction of traits beneficial to survival until, eventually, they are sufficiently changed to constitute a new species. Hence, new species originate very slowly, one tiny change after another, and eventually this can result in lemurs changing to humans via many intervening species.

Darwin fully recognized that a major weakness of this account of the origin of species involved what he and others referred to as the principle of "gradualism in nature." The fossil record was utterly inconsistent with gradualism. As Darwin acknowledged: "...why, if species have descended from other species by fine gradations, do we not everywhere see innumerable transitional forms? Why is not all nature in confusion instead of the species being, as we see them, well defined?"

Darwin offered two solutions. Transitional types are quickly replaced and hence would mainly only be observable in the fossil record. As for the lack of transitional types among the fossils, that was, Darwin admitted, "the most obvious and serious objection which can be urged against the theory."

Darwin dealt with this problem by blaming "the extreme imperfection of the geological record." "Only a small portion of the surface of the earth has been geologically explored, and no part with sufficient care." But, just wait, Darwin promised, the missing transitions will be found in the expected proportion when more research has been done. Thus began an intensive search for what the popular press soon called the "missing links."

Today, the fossil record is enormous compared to what it was in Darwin's day, but the facts are unchanged. The links are still missing; species appear suddenly and then remain relatively unchanged. As Steven Stanley reported: "The known fossil record...offers no evidence that the gradualistic model can be valid."

Indeed, the evidence has grown even more contrary since Darwin's day. "Many of the discontinuities [in the fossil record] tend to be more and more emphasized with increased collecting," noted the former curator of historical geology at the American Museum of Natural History. The history of most fossil species includes two features particularly inconsistent with gradualism, Stephen Jay Gould has acknowledged. The first problem is stasis. Most species exhibit no directional change during their tenure on earth. They appear in the fossil record looking much the same as when they disappear. The second problem is sudden appearance. Species do not arise gradually by the steady transformation of ancestors, they appear "fully formed."

These are precisely the objections raised by many biologists and geologists in Darwin's time--it was not merely that Darwin's claim that species arise through eons of natural selection was offered without supporting evidence, but that the available evidence was overwhelmingly contrary. Unfortunately, rather than concluding that a theory of the origin of species was yet to be accomplished, many scientists urged that Darwin's claims must be embraced, no matter what.

In keeping with Darwin's views, evolutionists have often explained new species as the result of the accumulation of tiny, favorable random mutations over an immense span of time. But this answer is inconsistent with the fossil record wherein creatures appear "full-blown and raring to go." Consequently, for most of the past century, biologists and geneticists have tried to discover how a huge number of favorable mutations can occur at one time so that a new species would appear without intermediate types.

However, as the eminent and committed Darwinist Ernst Mayr explained,The occurrence of genetic monstrosities by mutation...is well substantiated, but they are such evident freaks that these monsters can only be designated as 'hopeless.' They are so utterly unbalanced that they would not have the slightest chance of escaping elimination through selection. Giving a thrush the wings of a falcon does not make it a better flyer....To believe that such a drastic mutation would produce a viable new type, capable of occupying a new adaptive zone, is equivalent to believing in miracles.

The word miracle crops up again and again in mathematical assessments of the possibility that even very simple biochemical chains, let alone living organisms, can mutate into being by a process of random trial and error. For generations, Darwinians have regaled their students with the story of the monkey and the typewriter, noting that given an infinite period of time, the monkey sooner or later is bound to produce Macbeth purely by chance, the moral being that infinite time can perform miracles.

However, the monkey of random evolution does not have infinite time. The progression from simple to complex life forms on earth took place within a quite limited time. Moreover, when competent mathematicians considered the matter, they quickly calculated that even if the monkey's task were reduced to coming up with only a few lines of Macbeth, let alone Shakespeare's entire play, the probability is far, far beyond mathematical possibility. The odds of creating even the simplest organism at random are even more remote--Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, celebrated cosmologists, calculated the odds as one in ten to the 40,000th power. (Consider that all atoms in the known universe are estimated to number no more than ten to the 80th power.) In this sense, then, Darwinian theory does rest on truly miraculous assumptions.

Perhaps the most amazing aspect of the current situation is that while Darwin is treated as a secular saint in the popular media and the theory of evolution is regarded as the invincible challenge to all religious claims, it is taken for granted among the leading biological scientists that the origin of species has yet to be explained. Writing in Nature in 1999, Eörs Szathmay summarizes that, "The origin of species has long fascinated biologists. Although Darwin's major work bears it as a title, it does not provide a solution to the problem." When Julian Huxley claimed that "Darwin's theory is...no longer a theory but a fact," he surely knew better. But, just like his grandfather, Thomas Huxley, he knew that his lie served the greater good of "enlightenment."

When The Origin of Species was published it aroused immense interest, but initially it did not provoke antagonism on religious grounds. Although many criticized Darwin's lack of evidence, none raised religious objections. Instead, the initial response from theologians was favorable. The distinguished Harvard botanist Asa Gray hailed Darwin for having solved the most difficult problem confronting the Design argument--the many imperfections and failures revealed in the fossil record. Acknowledging that Darwin himself "rejects the idea of design," Gray congratulated him for "bringing out the neatest illustrations of it." Gray interpreted Darwin's work as showing that God has created a few original forms and then let evolution proceed within the framework of divine laws.

When religious antagonism finally came it was in response to aggressive claims, like Huxley's, that Newton and Darwin together had evicted God from the cosmos. For the heirs of the Enlightenment, evolution seemed finally to supply the weapon needed to destroy religion. As Richard Dawkins confided, "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist."

Atheism was central to the agenda of the Darwinians. Darwin himself once wrote that he could not understand how anyone could even wish that Christianity were true, noting that the doctrine of damnation was itself damnable. Huxley expressed his hostility toward religion often and clearly, writing in 1859: "My screed was meant as a protest against Theology & Parsondom...both of which are in my mind the natural & irreconcilable enemies of Science. Few see it but I believe we are on the Eve of a new Reformation and if I have a wish to live 30 years, it is to see the foot of Science on the necks of her Enemies." According to Oxford historian J. R. Lucas, Huxley was "remarkably resistant to the idea that there were clergymen who accepted evolution, even when actually faced with them." Quite simply, there could be no compromises with faith.

Writing at the same time as Huxley, the leading Darwinian in Germany, Ernst Haeckel, drew this picture:

On one side spiritual freedom and truth, reason and culture, evolution and progress stand under the bright banner of science; on the other side, under the black flag of hierarchy, stand spiritual slavery and falsehood, irrationality and barbarism, superstition and retrogression.... Evolution is the heavy artillery in the struggle for truth. Whole ranks of...sophistries fall together under the chain shot of this...artillery, and the proud and mighty structure of the Roman hierarchy, that powerful stronghold of infallible dogmatism, falls like a house of cards.

These were not the natterings of radical circles and peripheral publications. The author of the huge review of The Origin in the Times of London was none other than Thomas Huxley. He built his lectures on evolution into a popular touring stage show wherein he challenged various potential religious opponents by name. Is it surprising that religious people, scientists as well as clerics, began to respond in the face of unrelenting challenges like these issued in the name of evolution? It was not as if they merely were asked to accept that life had evolved--many theologians had long taken that for granted. What the Darwinians demanded was that religionists agree to the untrue and unscientific claim that Darwin had proved that God played no role in the process.

Among those drawn to respond was the Bishop of Oxford, Samuel Wilberforce, who is widely said to have made an ass of himself in a debate with Huxley during the 1860 meeting of the British Association at Oxford. The relevant account of this confrontation reported: "I was happy enough to be present on the memorable occasion at Oxford when Mr. Huxley bearded Bishop Wilberforce. The bishop arose and in a light scoffing tone, florid and fluent, he assured us that there was nothing in the idea of evolution. Then turning to his antagonist with a smiling insolence, he begged to know, was it through his grandfather or his grandmother that he claimed descent from a monkey? On this Mr. Huxley...arose...and spoke these tremendous words. He was not ashamed to have a monkey for an ancestor; but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth. No one doubted his meaning and the effect was tremendous."

This marvelous anecdote has appeared in every distinguished biography of Darwin and of Huxley, as well as in every popular history of the theory of evolution. In his celebrated Apes, Angels and Victorians, William Irvine used this tale to disparage the bishop's snobbery. In his prize-winning study, James Brix went much farther, describing Wilberforce as "naive and pompous," a man whose "faulty opinions" were those of a "fundamentalist creationist" and who provided Huxley with the opportunity to give evolution "its first major victory over dogmatism and duplicity." Every writer tells how the audience gave Huxley an ovation.

Trouble is, it never happened. The quotation above was the only such report of this story and it appeared in an article titled "A Grandmother's Tales" written by a non-scholar in a popular magazine 38 years after the alleged encounter. No other account of these meetings, and there were many written at the time, made any mention of remarks concerning Huxley's monkey ancestors, or claimed that he made a fool of the bishop. To the contrary, many thought the bishop had the better of it, and even many of the committed Darwinians thought it at most a draw.

Moreover, as all of the scholars present at Oxford knew, prior to the meeting, Bishop Wilberforce had penned a review of The Origin in which he fully acknowledged the principle of natural selection as the source of variations within species. He rejected Darwin's claims concerning the origin of species, however, and some of these criticisms were sufficiently compelling that Darwin immediately wrote his friend the botanist J. D. Hooker that the article "is uncommonly clever; it picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts, and brings forward well all the difficulties. It quizzes me quite splendidly." In a subsequent letter to geologist Charles Lyell, Darwin acknowledges that "the bishop makes a very telling case against me." Indeed, several of Wilberforce's comments caused Darwin to make modifications in a later revision of the book.

The tale of the foolish and narrow-minded bishop seems to have thrived as a revealing "truth" about the incompatibility of religion and science simply because many of its tellers wanted to believe that a bishop is wrong by nature. J. R. Lucas, who debunked the bishop myth, has suggested that the "most important reason why the legend grew" is, first, because academics generally "know nothing outside their own special subject" and therefore easily believe that outsiders are necessarily ignorant, and, second, because Huxley encouraged that conclusion. "The quarrel between religion and science was what Huxley wanted; and as Darwin's theory gained supporters, they took over his view of the incident."

Since then the Darwinian Crusade has tried to focus all attention on the most unqualified and most vulnerable opponents, and when no easy targets present themselves it has invented them. Huxley "made straw men of the 'creationists,'" as his biographer Desmond admitted. Even today it is a rare textbook or any popular treatment of evolution and religion that does not reduce "creationism" to the simplest caricatures.

This tradition remains so potent that whenever it is asked that evolution be presented as "only a theory," the requester is ridiculed as a buffoon. Even when the great philosopher of science Karl Popper suggested that the standard version of evolution even falls short of being a scientific theory, being instead an untestable tautology, he was subjected to public condemnations and much personal abuse.

Popper's tribulations illustrate an important basis for the victory of Darwinism: A successful appeal for a united front on the part of scientists to oppose religious opposition has had the consequence of silencing dissent within the scientific community. The eminent observer Everett Olson notes that there is "a generally silent group" of biological scientists "who tend to disagree with much of the current thought" about evolution, but who remain silent for fear of censure.

I believe that one day there will be a plausible theory of the origin of species. But, if and when that occurs, there will be nothing in any such theory that makes it impossible to propose that the principles involved were not part of God's great design any more than such a theory will demonstrate the existence of God. But, while we wait, why not lift the requirement that high school texts enshrine Darwin's failed attempt as an eternal truth?

Rodney Stark was professor of sociology at the University of Washington for many years and is now university professor of the social sciences at Baylor University. He is author of For the Glory of God (Princeton University Press) and other acclaimed books on science and religion.

Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus at Princeton’s Institute for Advanced Study, is a preeminent mathematical physicist, and one of the most wide-ranging thinkers and writers in modern science. These observations are drawn from interviews with Monte Davis and Stewart Brand.

QUESTION: How do we understand the universe at all? Do you agree with Carl Sagan that humans find the mathematics of gravitation so simple and elegant because natural selection eliminated the apes who couldn’t understand?

DYSON: Not at all. For apes to come out of the trees, and change in the direction of being able to write down Maxwell’s equations, I don’t think you can explain that by natural selection at all. It’s just a miracle.

QUESTION: You have written that “as we look out into the universe and identify the many accidents of physics and astronomy that have worked together to our benefit, it almost seems as if the universe must in some sense have known that we were coming.” Is that a playful suggestion?

QUESTION: Then we seem to be talking about sentiments that most people would consider religious. Are they religious for you?

QUESTION: The dominant tendency in modern science has been to assert that we occupy no privileged place, that the universe does not care, that science and religion don’t mix. Where do you fit into those ideas?

DYSON: The tendency you’re talking about is a modern one, not old. I think it became almost a dogma only with the fight for acceptance of Darwinism, Huxley versus Bishop Wilberforce, and so on. Before the nineteenth century, scientists were not ashamed of being religious, but since Darwin, it’s been taboo.

The biologists are still fighting Wilberforce. If you look now, the view that everything is due to chance and to little bits of molecular clockwork is mostly propounded by biologists, particularly people like Jacques Monod—whereas the physicists have become far more skeptical about that. If you actually look at the way modern physics is going, it’s very far from that. Yes, it’s the biologists who’ve made it so hard to talk about these things.

I was reading recently a magnificent book by Thomas Wright, written about 1750, when these inhibitions didn’t exist at all. Wright was the discoverer of galaxies, you know, and he writes:

“I can never look upon the stars without wondering that the whole world does not become astronomers; and that men, endowed with sense and reason, should neglect a science that must convince them of their immortality.”

QUESTION: There’s a provocative sentence in your book Imagined Worlds: “The laws of nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.” What do you mean by that?

DYSON: It’s the numerical accidents that make life possible. I define an interesting universe as one that is friendly to life, and especially one that produces lots of variety.

DYSON: If you look at just the physical building blocks, there’s a famous problem with producing carbon in stars. All the carbon necessary for life has to be produced in stars, and it’s difficult to do. To make carbon, you’ve got to have three helium atoms collide in a triple collision. Helium has an atomic weight of 4, and carbon is 12. Beryllium, at 8, is unstable, therefore you can’t go from helium to beryllium to carbon; you have to make helium into carbon in one jump. This means three atoms colliding together.

DYSON: No. But Fred Hoyle, who discovered this process, came up with one of the most brilliant ideas in the whole of science. He said that in order to make carbon abundant as it should be, there must be an accidental, coincidental resonance. This means that there’s a nuclear state in the carbon nucleus at precisely the right energy level for these three atoms to combine smoothly. The chance of having that resonance in the right place is maybe 1 in 1,000. Hoyle believed it must be there in order to produce the carbon. Of course, the nuclear physicists then looked for this resonance, and found it!

There are other famous cases: The fact that the nuclear force is just strong enough to bind a proton and a neutron to make the heavy isotope hydrogen, but not strong enough to bind two protons to make helium with an atomic weight of 2. Just two protons stuck together is a rather narrow range of strength. So the nuclear force is fine-tuned so that hydrogen doesn’t burn to helium right away. If the two hydrogen nuclei did bind, all the hydrogen would burn to helium in the first five minutes. The universe would then be pure helium and a rather boring place. Whereas, if the force were a little bit weaker, so that the neutron and the proton didn’t bind, you wouldn’t get any heavy elements at all. You’d have nothing but hydrogen. Again, this would make for a boring universe.

Velociraptors are built like birds. Their skeletons are thinner and lighter. A 2-meter raptor includes one meter of tail, so the actual animal is the size of a large dog. The best estimates place the critter in the 45-kg range -- big enough to be classed as megafauna.

If you'd like, we can go with the smaller dinos. Some were the size of chickens (~5 kg); many were smaller. The big guys (T. Rex @~6 tonnes, Triceratops @~5 tonnes, the sauropods @ 20-150 tonnes) always get the top billing because they are so impressive. Most of these critters, however, were less than 100 kgs in size.

Let's take it a step further. The largest land mammal that ever existed was the Indricotherium at about 20 tonnes -- or the size of four African elephants. That's the size of the smaller sauropods, and larger than just about every other dinosaur that existed, and yet it wasn't "buoyancy sorted" with them, but with later mammals. We could go on with mammals such as the megatherium (7 tonnes), the titanothere (6 tonnes), the Columbian Mammoth (7 tonnes) -- all comparable to dinosaurs in size, but never found mixed with the latters' bones.

Oh, and then we have the lovely terror birds that cropped up shortly after the demise of the dinosaurs, with some species actually hanging on until a couple of million years ago. These flightless birds ranged up to 4-meters in height and between 50 and 300 kgs (birds are built a bit lighter) -- and yet they are not found mixed with dinos or with more recent remains, regardless of size.

And, let's not even get started on the fish, aquatic reptiles (they weren't dinosaurs) or aquatic mammals, that magically sort themselves out in the fossil record in a manner reminiscent of vast scales of time and not "buoyancy sorting."

Methinks you are not really researching any of your arguments and are simply parroting what someone wrote on a creationist web page. Next time you do a web search, ditch the creationist sites. They are notoriously light on science. Go for things with .edu extensions. It's there that you will find most of the actual research being done in any given field (creationist "researchers" typically skim these sites for the odd out-of-context quote they can mine to bolster their untenable positions. Eliminate the middleman and go there yourself). I also find the science and nature sections of any good bookstore to be a wealth of information, expecially for a megafauna fanatic such as myself.

Bouyancy sorting is observable. What's more, it states that critters with the same level of tendancy to be bouyant will sort to the same level. This is observable with test objects in a lab. Cope's Law, on the other hand, is not observable and actually derives from theory based on theory.. And to the assumption that science has a clue what it's talking about with regard to said theory to the exclusion of all other possibility. For a theory that is yet unproven to produce laws based on assumption which you then inject here as a matter of dispute is begging the question. Where did you learn logic - or did you ever? Because what you just did is beg your argument to support your argument and that violates the first law of logic.

Right. This is where I dismiss what you've said out of hand. I'm sure you expected it. Bouyancy far and away better solves the issue of how animals appear in strata and the extremely good sort of said strata all things considered. I don't tend to dismiss things that tend to tell the story better - especially when the theory explains more than it causes need to theorize about. Sorry, the fewer elements needing explained by a theory, the more likely the theory is to hold up. How many theories and subtheories is evolution up to now?..

Ah, I wondered how long it would take you to decide you couldn't overcome me in debate and would have to go after me personally. ROFL.

Interesting. How about you pick yourself up off the floor and stop laughing for a minute and try to think really hard about just what "debate" you are engaged in. To me, it boils down to this:
Havoc: "There are no transitionals."
Science: "define transitional."
Havoc: "A bat with half a wing. A human with gliding membranes, etc."
Science: "You will never find such things, as this isn't what is predicted or shown in the fossil record. Here are some real transitionals."
Havoc: "They aren't transitionals because I say so. Where are the current transitionals?"
science: "Here are some current examples."
Havoc: "I don't see a fish with one leg."
Science: At this point, "science" pretty much throws up it's arms because it realizes it's "arguing" with a numbnut who doesn't grasp 6th grade conceptions of niches, fitness, and other basic tenets of biology.
Havoc: Still doesn't get it, and never will.

Who says evolution "relegates man to an accident of nature". Evolution is silent as to whether there is meaning to the creation of humans. Evolution doesn't deal with "why are there all these different forms of life?" Evolution deals only with "how did there come to be all these forms of life?" Evolution is contradictory only to a literal interpretation of the Bible, not to religion in general. Evolution is a scientific theory, not a philosophical position. It seems that it is creationists who seek to make evolution what it is not.

Sounds like argument from antiquity to me. Yet another logical fallacy. Just because the Bible predates evolution and big bang theories, it doesn't hold that the Biblical account is true and the modern theories false. The Bible was written for the people of that time and subsequent times to use as a guide to life. It would have made little sense for God to include theories which the people reading the Bible wouldn't understand for several thousand years. The Bible had to be written in terms that would be understood by people living in all ages. For example, the Bible says that God created all of the different animal species. If you built a machine that made widgets, would you say that you built widgets or that the machine built the widgets. Similarly, it's possible that God built the "machine" of evolution to create all of the animal species. But several thousand years ago, when man didn't have machines to create other items, people may not have understood this idea. If God had written "I have created a cell and this cell will mutate and those mutations that are conducive to the reproductive success of the organism shall survive" would people four thousand years ago have understood? Similarly, when God said "let there be light" could this not have been the event that started the big bang? Would readers of the bible three thousand years ago have understood, "let the space-time continuum begin to expand"? The point is that science and religion are not contradictory. There is one truth, and anything that leads toward that truth cannot be contradictory. If it seem contradictory to us, it is because of our limited understanding.

Havoc writes:

For a theory that is yet unproven to produce laws based on assumption which you then inject here as a matter of dispute is begging the question. Where did you learn logic - or did you ever? Because what you just did is beg your argument to support your argument and that violates the first law of logic.

As I see the word "theory" used quite a bit by Havoc, some reference material on theories, opinions, etc.

See http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1037248/posts?page=70#70

where Havoc writes:

"Note: a theory is still an opinion."

to which a response comes:

"Incorrect. A theory is "An entire body of knowledge associated with a particular area of study, including the basic postulates, predictions based on these postulates, observations and experimental data, and their interpretation. [Cal Poly Physics Colloquium, 9/23/99]. Theories are well described, repeatedly observed, and verified statements. When they have repeatedly confirmed over a long period of time, the theory for all practical purposes is used as true or fact, (sometime referred to as superb theory such as quantum mechanics).

Theory does not imply uncertainty or opinion - not in science."

Apparently, you and only you know what goes on inside the mind of God? To answer your question of "why would God create the big bang and evolution?" the answer is I don't have the first idea, and neither do you. The evidence is in favor of both of these ideas, though. I am a scientist so I will NOT claim that both of these are true, they may not be. But as of now, to the best of our ability to understand these questions, these seem to be the best answers. If new evidence is found, I will change this belief.

Don't be dense. Regardless of what a critter's ancestors or its descendents look like, it is "fully developed" for its particular ecological niche at its particular time. All organisms, lest they go extinct, are "transitionals" because the demands of the environment change.

Adaptation is not evolution. That's first and foremost. And there are two things happening here - one is the request to fulfill an expectation you can't fulfill. And two is your attempt to fulfill that expectation with something not asked for and get everyone to believe that you've done what was asked. A fully developed animal is a fully developed animal. It don't matter what it looks like.

I think we all understand language here. A car moving down an assembly line is in transition from incomplete to being complete. But the kind of transition we're talking about here would be the morphing of a camaro into a transam, for instance. And the transition stages would, in this case, only show up in the workshop where it was designed. We would not traditionally expect to find examples of the clay mockups of the car being driven around on the street. They are generally destroyed after the mockup no longer serves a purpose.

You contend as would I, that nature doesn't have a mockup period. I would say God just up and made every creature as our scriptures state. You would say that things transition into new things. Not observable; but, ok. So, we ask you to show the transition. Show the reptile sprouting wings over time. You can't. You want to show us the Transam and say, this is a transition fossil. No, it's a seperate product that in this case really was designed. We're asking you for the animal's "mockups" for the transitional stages that brought it to the "trans am" state. You are aware of this as are the initiators of the evolution arguments. And this is why they have you handing off completed items because in the entire history of fossil finding not one transitional beast has ever been found. Not one.

And no, we aren't going to let you get by with word games on what makes a transitional animal. It has been very well defined and you know precisely what we speak of. You have nothing. So you're trying to sell something else in place of what's been asked for to create the appearance of fullfillment. This would be called fraud. And that is why I call all of you collectively "snake oil salesmen". Though, it would probably save space to just call you Liars.

Has it ocurred to you that the way Bats hang upside down in wet caves and hold their young might present problems if Bats had feathered wings.

No. Because there are plenty of birds that live in wet environments and raise their young perfectly well with feathered wings.

And if efficiency of design is such a no brainer and Lamborghinis are the best car on the road.. why aren't semi trucks shaped like Lamborghinis. Oh, that isn't fair is it. screwing with the design of something obviously meant to serve a different purpose and operate differently.

Your analogy fails. Birds and Bats aren't like trucks and lamborghinis. They're more like ferraris and lamborghinis: they occupy very similar niches and do very similar things. If you were designing a sports car, would you ditch all of the things we know about lamborghinis, ferraris and corvettes and start from scratch? That is, to a large extent, what has happened with bats when compared to birds.

The design makes sense for the purpose of the critter.

I didn't say bats don't make sense, I'm just pointing out that it doesn't make sense to take everything that works on birds and then try to re-invent it.

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