There is, however, substantial evidence that man evolved from a common ape ancestor and that other extant animals evolved from ancestors common with other extant animals. The evidence does not need to be a continuous line from man to protolife, or more correctly, initial life to man. Humans excel at discerning patterns, patterns such as the common descent of all animals, from incomplete information. If we see a pattern often enough in similar circumstances, we can infer that the consistency in the pattern is valid in other like circumstances. Why deny this pattern recognition ability when it comes to common descent but rely on it for everything else in your life?
"Those who have swallowed that pipe dream hook line and sinker are experiencing nothing more than a faith based experience.
Since scientists are the ones that actually investigate, test and verify their ideas before accepting them but creationists simply accept the meanderings of the Hovindites and Johnsonites of the world, which do you logically think are really swallowing that pipe dream? Remember, be logical.
"Even definitive proof of how the one celled organism originated is up for grabs.
That may be true today, but as science has shown time after time, what is unknown today will likely not remain that way very long.
Evolutionists claim the Linnaean hierarchy is a crucial test that their theory has passed. But from the placental and marsupials to molecular comparisons, nature is full of deviations from that pattern. If the theory predicts the Linnaean hierarchy, then do the many deviations disprove the theory? Not according to evolutionists. Instead, they employ a battery of ad hoc explanatory devices, from convergent evolution and non-gradualistic evolutionary change to massive horizontal gene transfer and computational adjustments. But if evolution can explain the many deviations from the Linnaean hierarchy so well, it can hardly claim the general hierarchical pattern of the species as a crucial test.What if there were yet even more deviations? At what point would evolution be unable to explain them? Evolutionists can define no such point because they allow their theory to explain such a wide variety of outcomes. In fact, it is not even clear that evolution really does predict the Linnaean hierarchy. The problem is that the Linnaean hierarchy is a striking pattern that is not easily produced by any hypothetical evolutionary process. That is, even if we grant that evolution could produce large-scale change, that change would, on the one hand, have to create tremendous biological variation, and yet, on the other hand, have to create not so much variation that evolutionary relationships would be lost through saturation effects. Because evolution's purported process of creating large-scale change remains undefined, we don't have the neccessary details to seriously verify the claim that it predicts the Linnaean hierarchy.
Cornelius G. Hunter
Cordially,