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What they were whining about is that he does not believe in real hard-core evolutionism that argues for amoebas turning into horses given enough time and chance up there on mount improbable.
in Christ,
Bob
Ok. Let's go through this, really slowly.
Amoebas do not 'turn into' horses. Nobody has ever said that, and if they did, they were a fool. Creationists just love mischaracterizing evolutionary theory in varying degrees of ridiculousness (crocoduck anybody?) but no matter how you state it all you show is you just don't even basically understand it to be able to criticize it. Not even the tiniest portion of the basics. Actually
read the Origin of Species (it's kind of heavy going, but no heavier than Isaiah) and demonstrate some understanding of what the basics actually say, then come at it, and you'll do a lot better.
Something that looked something like an amoeba, given billions of years, "gave birth" to offspring that gave birth to offspring and so on, maybe millions or even billions of generations of breeding (because we're not talking about 75 years between these generations). Their descendants after millions and millions of "generations" include horses, dogs, cats, marsupials, plants, bacteria, and yes, humans.
Actually, the process, greatly simplified - likely started with two prokaryotes 'turning into' (to borrow your not-so-great phrase, but it'll do) a eukaryotic cell.
A larger prokaryote can engulf a smaller, aerobically respiring prokaryote (through a well known process known as endocytosis, that is occurring in your body right now, incidentally, in case you want to disbelieve that too).
The smaller prokaryote becomes a membrane bound organelle, a specific feature to eukaryotes, so the resulting organism is undoubtedly a eukaryote. When it then divides through standard cellular reproduction, the divided cells will
also be eukaryotes. If you compare the new eukaryotes with the original prokaryotes, you'd see two different organisms, but they're
fundamentally different.
It's a step in a very very very very very very very very very very long process, the magnitude of which is almost too vast to comprehend.
A monkey did NOT turn into a human, ever in the history of the universe. We share an ancestor who looked something like an ape and we classify as an ape.
Every time the genetic information was passed on, the system that passes it on is somewhat imperfect, and mutations in the code are possible - and indeed, quite probable. The average mutation rate as measured is around 175 nucleotides
per gene in every generation, and there are approximately 3 billion nucleotides in the human genome - we're talking a small difference, but it's significant. The variation rate has varied hugely and will continue to vary hugely, but it was enough to allow for everything you see around you.
The whole process is exceptionally, mind-boggingly slow -
billions of years - with occasional spurts relative to that speed, but still, even those spurts are pretty slow. So slow and involving numbers so large that the human mind is not exactly brilliant at comprehending it, and even some evolutionary biologists have a hard time explaining it, which is part of the problem sometimes.
Creationists sometimes win debates (or think they win) because throwing out reason and just believing in a book of poetry IS simpler and easier to communicate to the uneducated masses, but unfortunately it is vastly too simple for a world that we are gradually learning is vastly too complex for a single book, not even a "good" book. It is certainly vastly too complex to refute scientific progress with biblical quotes, however nice the poetry is.
The fact that it's hard to explain does not make it any more or less true. Quantum mechanics is extreme hard to explain but tests have shown it so far to have large portions that makes extremely (EXTREMELY) precise predictions about the nature of the observed world that match the actual observations. Evolutionary theory can yield precise predictions that have been shown to match observation, thus it is held by the vast (VAST) majority of scientists expert in the field to be true.
