I don't think it's worth burning anyone at the stake for either. Some may seriously question my sanity for even indulging SNE by discussing it with him. Obviously, there is no proof that matters to him. He seems incapable of grasping the details anyway.
Shultbear56, with regard to trying to convince someone, let me just say that there is no proof out there that can conclusively prove why life is here on earth. It's always the goal of science to explain things. In fact science can accurately be described as an undertaking to find out the "cause" of something, which involves the mechanism by which something happened. With regard to science, we are just not at a point where science can explain how life showed up on this planet. We can only know what didn't happen when you disprove a theory.
There is no short answer of why I know evolution as envisioned by Darwin can't be the real answer to the problem. In Darwin's day they knew nothing of DNA, they only crudely understood the cell and had no knowledge of microbiology. His theory emerged at a time when cellular and microbiological science was just really getting started. Coincidentally, right about the same time was when the roots of secularism were forming. It was that coincidence that made his theory even that more popular. While not immediately accepted as a scientific theory, it quickly became a very popular philosophical explanation for why God wasn't needed any more. It gave the perfect excuse for God. So the adoption was as much philosophical as it was scientific.
The only modern analogy that can be made is the global warming theory. It is a really bad theory and virtually unsubstantiated except by what we now know is a bunch of bogus science. Have you ever wondered why so many latched on to it? It was because it meshed conveniently with the political philosophies of the left, who just happen to represent the majority of the mainstream press. So it took off and got traction not because it was a good scientific theory but because it meshed conveniently with the philosophy of the day. Evolution is really no different.
Just look at the ardent evolution evangelists. They are admitted secularists. They are committed materialists, who readily admit their bias and reject the idea that God is possible in advance of drawing their conclusions. There is no doubt that there is a religious element to their belief. The theory of evolution is part of their theology. Note how SNE argues, not from the point of science, but from more of a philosophical basis. Notwithstanding the fact I don't think he understands enough biochemistry to understand the problem, he shows no interest in actually knowing how it actually works. He seeks to confuse, not to clarify.
When I looked at the problem of evolution it was clear to me that the only objective evidence available to tell us how life showed up on earth, the fossil record, did not show a gradual emergence of life. Read on it. Every palaeontologist knows that there are no intermediate forms. Life just tended to show up, live for a while relatively unmodified, then die off fairly suddenly. It's clear to see by anyone who looks at the fossil record. That is the value of understanding events like the Cambrian Explosion where the most complex life on earth was sightless worms and simple sponges. A mere 0-10 million years later, you have organisms that have all the organ systems of modern man with a complex mammalian eye. In other words, no eyes to the complex human eye in the geologic blink of an eye. Those organisms lived for a couple of million years during the Cambrian period and then just as suddenly died off.
So, where are the intermediate forms? They don't exist. That is the problem. Remember, the fossil record is objective evidence you can study, put your finger on, and is like the family album of the past life on earth. Sort of like pictures of great-great grandpa are pretty good evidence he lived. Evolution, if real, would require you find some intermediate forms somewhere in the fossil record. They just haven't found them.
If you read carefully, the given excuse for lack of pre-cambrian absence of complex life is that they didn't fossilize. That is repeated over and over. Unfortunately that notion was made popular before the rich Chinese Cambrian fossil beds were discovered. They uniquely fossilized in a way that preserved the soft structure of pre-cambrian life. It turns out, oops, there was no complex life at all. That lie, however, get conveniently propagated over and over.
Worse, is that Darwin knew this. If his knowledge of cell biology was non-existent, his knowledge of the fossil record was pretty good. Paleontology had been around for a hundred or so years by then and had been all the rage. It was hot science back then. Darwin fundamentally understood the problems of the absence of intermediate forms in the fossil record and the sudden appearance of life on earth and an equally sudden disappearance. His answer to that problem was, "just keep looking." He was confident further research would find those forms.
150 years later, and a butt load of research later and they aren't there. If anything, the case against him is tighter than it was. You can be more sure that the Darwinian intermediates aren't there. So ask yourself, by any objective measure does that support or indict the theory of the gradual emergence of life which is a required result of random mutation and natural selection? While you are at it, you might want to ask yourself where are all those intermediate forms today? There are none that exist in nature. Wonder why?
When you delve into the problem of the cell, things get worse. When you gain an even rudimentary knowledge of cell biology, you will quickly find out a cell is a lot like a manufacturing plant. It has walls, a command center, and then a whole floor of machines intended for producing various products. Like any plant cells specialize in different products. Langerhans cells make insulin to lower blood sugar, columnar epithelium specialize in producing mucous and then have fine little hairs at the end that flush that mucous towards the top of your larynx where you hack up the debris cleaned from your respiratory track. Epidermal cells specialize in the production of keratin that keeps your skin opaque (we'd look gross if it was transparent!!), gives us a nice tan, and works as an effective barrier to invasion of outside foreign material, notably bacteria. Each of those function with the exact same genetic code. Cellular function changes as each cell specializes. It does this without mutation or even variation by turning on or suppressing parts of the genetic material it is handed.
Darwin knew nothing of this. He looked at a cell the way most of us look at McDonalds. It has a shell, we drive up, we get breakfast through the drive through and leave. We know little of the interworkings of how that sausage and egg biscuit got into the bag in our hand. It's a "black box" to us. That is how Darwin viewed the cell. He knew nothing of it.
That is why cellular biology changed the game totally, as it did a lot of medicine and biologic sciences. When understood, each of those cellular machines are made up of proteins, each of which is formed by a series of templates found in our genetic code. Proteins are 3 dimensional objects that fit together often times in very specific shapes and perform work. No cellular machine, or mechanism consists of only one part. The simplest known protein machine is a flagellum that moves single cell organisms through water. That flagellum consists of at least 50 individual parts necessary to make it function. So a minimum of 50 genes are required to make it work. In truth, it is usually multiple gene loci that account for a single protein part of the machine. So the genes required are always more than the number of parts.
The problem of irreducible complexity is simple. If a cell were to "evolve" a flagellum, how could it possibly do it? Evolution, by definition, is driven by random gene mutations, each of which must provide some survival advantage to the organism in order that it will win the war to mate and pass on that genetic code. So how does a single gene mutation that makes a part of a flagellum, which is non-functional in any way, get passed on? Even evolutionary theory would tell you that gene mutation would not get passed. It does not even meet the basic test of the theory. Clearly in order to have the flagellum benefit the organism, it would have to develop 100 gene mutations at once, all precisely at the right spots, in snyc with each other, all just by random chance. Mathematically, that is impossible. There are mathematical rules that can clearly examine that problem and the answer is "no way".
That is the nature of irreducible complexity. When you understand that a cell is a production plant filled with protein based machines that make things, it is an easy step to understand that single random mutations can't be the answer to the problem. Add to that the lack of objective evidence in the fossil record and any person interested in the subject should start to seriously question why evolution is a viable theory.
Where does that leave a person trying to decide? When you are trying to objectively think about this, you can rule out evolution as a possibility because it doesn't fit the clearly available evidence. That is all you can say. It doesn't prove God, it only tells you that you have to look elsewhere to decide if God is a possibility. It doesn't prove creation or a Creator. At worst, you can say you have no idea, but you can safely say that evolution isn't the answer.
As for me, I widen my perspective and look at other areas of science. I have a pretty fair working knowledge of astronomy and astrophysics because it's been a lifelong hobby. I could no more sit down and do the math that proves relativity than I could draw the molecular structure of a complex molecule by memory. But, I am well versed on the concepts and what they mean. The universe was created from nothing. That much is proven to a high degree of confidence. So we know of an act of creation. Every thing that exists in the entire universe was created from nothing. When I examine the universe I see a high degree of orderly laws that govern it, a precision in how it was formed, and how the quantum unpredictability at the sub-atomic level contributed to a varied dispersal of mass in the universe just enough to make it interesting. In other words from nothing sprang a highly ordered and precisely functioning universe. It was a creative event resulting in a high degree of order.
Some look at that and see nothing. I look at that event, consider what I know about the complex inner workings of the human machine, and I do not see random causation. I see planning. I see order. I see a supremely designed machine with a capacity to understand a spiritual things. I see God. I take it as a matter of faith because I can't prove it, but know without doubt that God is possible. Nothing can disprove God, and while evolution seeks to do just that, it fails not only because it's a lousy theory, but the evidence does not support it.
So you and everyone else has the option of deciding what they believe. They can trust "scientists" or they can trust science. Clearly science tells us evolution has strong contradictions that speak against it. Scientists are far less objective and cling to it as a theory because it allows them to be committed secularists and deny God. This is a rhetorical question, but why should the idea of a Creator be excluded from a scientific theory? We know creation exists, correct? So why automagically exclude the possibility of a Creator? It does so because many in science have an agenda. If nothing else, the global warming lie should have shown us all that rather clearly.
I am not preaching at you specifically, so don't take this as some type of argument aimed at you. You just happened to be the poor soul who made the last comment when I had time to type
Don't let my longwindedness deter you from commenting further.
