A question important to this thread is what can and cannot be established as being fact. To go back to Descartes who really thought about this for a long time. His famous answer was "cogito ergo sum" I think therefore I am.

If you want to get down to the only thing you cannot deny as being true is the fact that you are a thinking being. everything that your senses tell you could be a lie. The only thing that is absolutely true is the fact that one's own thoughts exist.

Descartes postulated as his worst case scenario the very cool concept of the 'evil genius' who is somehow feeding all false information into your senses (yes Virginia, the idea of the Matrix is from the seventeeth century) The only thing the evil genius cannot falsify is the fact that there is a thinking being that is experincing these thoughts.

As an aside, Descartes goes on to 'prove' using only what he can believe as being undeniably true (no external evidence, only thought), and using logic, the existence of a God.

one good website about Descartes is
uhttp://www.utm.edu/research/iep/d/descarte.htm

What all I'm saying boils down to is that next to nothing in this world is absolutely provably 100% ipso facto true to a bazillion decimal points.

The question is how much certainty do you want to accept.

With that being said, evolution has been proven to the limit of certainty. Is it 100% undeniably true? No, nothing is, and scientist are aware of that fact, but its as close as you can get.

I am saying that evolution is a fact. That being, the descent with modification of different lineages from common ancestors. This includes one species evolving into another.

The theory of evolution can easily be proved to be false. One simply must make a prediction based on it, and then show that prediction to be false. Every prediction based on the theory of evolution so far has proven to be true. In contrast, creationism isn't falsifiable at all.

It's also important to remember that there's no such thing as a "species" in real life. It's just an artifical label that scientists made up to help them classify organisms. In reality, there is a very gradual range of differences between all organisms. Naturally, most of the common ancestors and transitional forms are now extinct, though.

The theory of evolution assumes a self-replicating lifeform existed at the beginning of the process. It necessarily limits its scope because the phenomenon is provable without this information.

Personally, I think think that time is infinite, and extends forever into the past and future. So, in that model, then perhaps that matter has always existed? I guess that's hard for people to believe, since they like for things to have a "beginning" and an "end". But the more I think about it, I don't think time works that way.

Although like I said, that's not evolution. It's more like, "Origins of the Universe".

Evolution is "the descent with modification of different lineages from common ancestors". There is nothing in that definition about the origin of the universe.

The fossil record is directly relevant, because it gives us evidence of transitional forms -- something predicted by the Theory of Evolution.

Syc just pointed out to me that I was wrong here. In fact, humans <i>are</i> apes, as are all of the common ancestors between them and the living apes. Doh!

I guess what would be more accurate is that the statement, "We evolved from apes" is a little deceptive. It implies that we evolved from the apes that are alive today, which isn't true at all.

Or: "Entities should not be multiplied unnecessarily."

Here's a history of Occam's razor. It was originally used to suggest that one cannot use reason alone to deduce God's existence.

Anyway, the simplest explanation is not always the one that is easiest to write. If it were, then Occam's razor would always provide the same answer: Magic! Why does the sun come up? Magic! Why is grass green? Magic! Why is the sky blue? Magic! How did my prize sheep end up in my neighbor's flock? Magic!

The entities Occam wants to slice away are theoretical constructs that must be taken on faith. One way to apply it to evolution is as follows: microevolution is obvious, known, demonstrated, and generally accepted. It explains how one species can change over time, and gain and lose traits. We have fossil evidence that many years ago there were animals that no longer exist, and there are many animals that exist now that have no evidence of existing earlier than a certain point many years ago. But there are structural similarities between some of the extinct animals and some of the current animals.

I'll use the non-scientific version of the word 'theory' here: We have two theories:
A) Microevolution happens as observed, but God does the big changes.
B) Micro- and macro- evolution are the same process in different timeframes and environmental pressures.

Theory B is the one with fewer entities, and therefore the one Occam points to.

How It Happened
 

My brother began to dictate in his best oratorical style, the one which has the tribes hanging on his words.
“In the beginning,” he said, “exactly fifteen point two billion years ago, there was a big bang and the Universe—”
But I had stopped writing. “Fifteen billion years ago?” I said incredulously.
“Absolutely,” he said. “I’m inspired.”
“I do not question your inspiration,” I said. (I had better not. He’s three years younger than I am, but I don’t try questioning his inspiration. Neither does anyone else or there’s hell to pay.) “But are you going to tell the story of the Creation over a period of fifteen billion years?”
“I have to,” said my brother. “That’s how long it took. I have it all in here,” he tapped his forehead, “and it’s on the very highest authority.”
By now I had put down my stylus. “Do you know the price of papyrus?” I said.
“What?” (He may be inspired but I frequently noticed that the inspiration didn’t include such sordid matters ad the price of papyrus.)
I said, “Suppose you describe one million years of events to each roll of papyrus. That means you’ll have to fill fifteen thousand rolls. You’ll have to talk long enough to fill them and you know that you begin to stammer after a while. I’ll have to write enough to fill them and my fingers will fall off and even if we can afford all that papyrus and you have the voice and I have the strength, who’s going to copy it? We’ve got to have a guarantee of a hundred copies before we can publish and without that where will we get royalties from?”
My brother thought awhile. He said, “You think I ought to cut it down?”
“Way down,” I said, “if you expect to reach the public.”
“How about a hundred years?” he said.
“How about six days?” I said.
He said, horrified, “You can’t squeeze Creation into six days.”
I said, “This is all the papyrus I have. What do you think?”
“Oh, well,” he said, and began to dictate again. “In the beginning—Does it have to be six days, Aaron?”
I said, firmly, “Six days, Moses.”

-- Isaac Asimov

Taking the Bible literally, I used the story which includes "Give unto Caeser what is Caeser's and give unto God what is God's" to mean that Jesus began the separation of Church and State.

I think that if God/dess wants to create the world through evolution, who are we to say S/He can't? Things seem too perfect for them to be mere chance...it seems logical that there is some kind of intelligence behind it. There is no reason that science and religion have to be at odds. If one is true, it doesn't necessarily make the other false, and just because we can't prove that something is there doesn't mean it isn't. It just means we can't measure it YET.

To paraphrase MIB...five thousand years ago, everyone KNEW the earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everyone KNEW the earth was flat, and five minutes ago, you KNEW you were alone in the universe....Imagine what you'll KNOW tomorrow.

Sidhe

I saw an interesting analogy for this reasoning. I think it was in Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams. Imagine a puddle of water in the ground wakes up and contemplates its environment. It notices that the hole it is in is the perfect shape to contain it. That hardly seems to be likely enough to have happened by chance, so the puddle concludes that the hole was dug especially for it.

Evolution is the process by which life adapts to fill its environment. Life that more perfectly meshes with its environment (including other life) is more successful. So intricate, perfectly balanced dependencies end up appearing.

This isn't to deny that it is possible that evolution is directed, but the intricate dependencies don't imply it.

It comes down to this. Either you believe that the bible is the infallible word of God, or you don't.

If you do, then you can't be an evolutionist, because you believe that yom means 1 plain old regular 24 hour day, that God created the whole kit and caboodle.

If you don't, and you want it proved to you, well, that's a bit harder. And what this thread is about.

Why make this exception? Even the most faithful person has to realize that assuming the accuracy of scripture is fallible. One can have faith that it is true, but humans are fallible, so faith can be fallible.

It's a bit hypocritical to criticize science for relying on assumptions when ALL of religion is an assumption.

The idea that scripture is God's word is fallible. It is a human idea.