Many are fearful to abandon the theory of evolution no matter how flawed. To do so would force them to admit that science is an insufficient tool to describe our universe. This is a scary bridge for someone whose whole belief system is that man is self-sufficient and given time and technology will discover the answers to all of life's mysteries.
BTW since humans are the climax community on earth thus far, does it not seem likely that the chimpanzes, dolphins, or something should have at least discovered fire by now? :)
Thanks!
The basic reality is this. You might could at least listen to a theory which required one or even two probabilistic miracles in the whole history of the Earth, but evolution requires an essentially infinite chain of probabilistic miracles. The original requirement of abiogenesis is a probabilistic miracle, and every step to some entirely new kind of complex creature is a probabilistic miracle.
To believe in something like that amounts to the same thing as claiming not to believe in mathematics and probability theory; nobody making such a claim should be taken seriously.
They tried for several decades to produce just one such probabilistic miracle using every possible kind of laboratory device and could not do it. Fruit flies produce new generations every few DAYS, and they conducted experiments involving subjecting fruit flies to everything known to cause mutations and then recombining the mutations, and they did this for decades, and all they ever got was what the breeders told Chuck Darwin was all he'd ever get via any such process, which was sterile freaks and individuals which returned, boomarang-like, to the norm for a fruit fly. All they ever got was fruit flies.
A number of the scientists involved in these studies in the early part of the 20'th century abandoned evolutionism as a result, including the famous case of Goldschmidt who went on to devise his "hopeful monster" theory and claimed he was being subjected to the kind of "two minute hates" mentioned in Orwell's book at scientific meetings.
Ultimately, evolutionists are like the southerners of which Clark Gable says "All they have left is arrogance." That and name-calling talents are basically the only stock in trade of the little evo clique on FR, the talk.origins crew and other evo groups on the net.
If by "universe" you mean, "material existense," science, and it's tools, and it's language are the only means we have for describing and understanding it. When the Bible, which does not pretend to be a book of science, discusses the material universe, it does so in the "scientific" terms, that is, terms of measurement, weight, velocity, distance, etc. We have no other terms of means for discussing or understanding the material world, because those are the material terms.
As for evolution, it is neither science, or, technically speaking, a theory. Evolution is a hypothesis, no so much about origins, as is supposed, as methods of development. It is not science for two reasons, first because there is no way to test the hypothesis or verify that the principles it espouses work. This is why it remains and will always remain an hypothesis, because a theory is a hypothesis that has been experimentally tested and verified.
The other reason evolution is not science is because the pricniples derived from real science can be applied in some practical way. (This application is generally called technology.) There is no technology to be derived from the discoveries of evolution.
For these reasons, the whole question of evolution is much less important than creationists and government educators have made it.
Hank