Posted by
Steve on Wednesday, November 29, 2006 8:44:17 PM
Today while setting up for a lab, I heard a clip from another instructor about evolution. In the clip, one of the authors of the textbook we use was interviewed about evolution. The exchange was humorous and entertaining. The problem with the interview is that the interviewer and the interviewee set up a straw dog for Intelligent Design and then proceeded to shoot it down.
The straw dog is that all Intelligent Design people believe that everything was created exactly as it is today. That is not how I understand Intelligent Design. Intelligent Design differs from Evolution in that Intelligent Design explains how life began without breaking any of the laws of biology. Evolution has to break the laws of biology to explain how life began. After life came upon the earth, it started changing to forces of nature and man. These changes we call evolution. We do know that evolution occurs in the short term. We do not know if evolution works over the long term, because nobody has been around long enough. And the fossil evidence is incomplete in regards to life. There are huge gaps that we still need to fill. We are filling them as we speak, but they are still huge gaps.
Intelligent Design says that something placed life here on earth to start everything in motion. Was it placed as a single cell or a tree? We do not know the answer. People believe that things were placed here completely constructed. People also believe that things were placed here that would evolve into what we know of today. Which is the true way things were placed here? There is no way of knowing for sure, now. Science is trying to find the answers to those and other questions. Will we ever know the answers to these questions? Probably not, as if life were placed here as cells, there would be no fossil evidence.
If life were placed here whole, there would be evidence. There would be a time with no life and then suddenly time with life. We have not found that type of evidence. That leads me to believe that life was placed here as soft tissue. There was no hard tissue in the life placed upon the earth. This would account for all the evidence we have at this time. Is this the final answer? No. We are still searching for the elusive early evidence. We may yet find evidence to lead one to conclude one way or the other, but not at this time. At this time the evidence looks like it points in one direction. That could be deceptive. We may just have uncovered the part of the arrow that points in one direction. When we uncover the full arrow, we discover it points in another direction. I would love to be here when this is discovered. I doubt that will happen as I am one of the older baby boomers.