I did not believe macroevolution as an agnostic bin High School.
As a slave to Christ and a former professor of medicine at U of Miami, this 54yo is ever more amazed that intelligent people can bend reality to make the absurd appear reasonable.
Fossils and geology have never interested me. Genetics I've an aquaintance with. Right now the big lie is that there is lots of "junk" DNA. Those that promote this forget that DNA is not just an information carrier, but it itself has a structure which in the Eukaryote is carefully controlled by wrapping around histone. In any case, we are already seeing much of the "junk DNA" found useful after all.
It reminds me of the popularity of "vestigial organs" during the early days of Darwinism that led to the removal of such "vestigial" organs as the parathyroids, followed by death reminding physicians they'd better go back to viewing the body as a well designed machine, and not a hodge-podge of evolutionary dead ends. "Junk DNA" might as well be called "vestigial DNA" and we will see how much, or not, junk ther is. Originally the list of vestigial organs was at 120, now there's 2 and not all of us are convinced those 2 are in fact vestigial at all.
As to scientist being all that advanced, we still are finding large organs that, somehow, thousands of anatomists convinced one another were not there:
New human body part discovered | I [bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse][bless and do not curse]ing Love Science
Every person has an amazing ability for self-deception. Why do we think that objectivity is inherent to a doctorate? As I said, the evidence convinced me that macroevolution, guided or not, was a worthless theory long before I believed in anything. In fact, I wanted to believe in evolution, as my belief in science was the last hope of believing in anything at all. As an agnostic it was not easy walking into total darkness, with nothing to hold onto but "puteo ergo sum."
My first questions about evolution came while watching Walter Cronkite describing the moon landing. He went on and on about how billions of years was supposed to have left many feet of lunar dust and so, if the bottom of the craft sank too far, the top part of the lander would take off without a man actually setting foot on the moon. Surprise surprise, only enough dust for about 10,000 years. Walter Cronkite was glad, but the little boy (me) watching that live asked himself--where did the dust go?
I asked, and asked, and well, that led me to more questions about other subjects I found more interesting, like single carbon metabolism, and this 54 year old little boy is still asking. My question is no longer, why this or that or the other fact which is TOTALLY incompatible with macroevolution, guided OR blind, but rather, just how dark can intelligent minds get when they persist in worshiping the creation, often indeed worshipping themselves or one another, rather than the creator. And how scaredy-cat can Christians get when they are out numbered by a bunch of white coatts claiming they are objective and we ignoramuses.
I am not going to waste any time debating evolution until you can show me how PV=nRT is compatible with thin hydrogen gas condensing to a star (gravity being many, many orders of magnitude too weak) and how you can make a chirally pure molecule using only achiral precursors in ANY laboratory setting. These are Junior High subjects.
If you do not put in the effort to understand basic high school chemistry, why should I invest the time to discuss what I know best: the intricate delicate dance of 6 vitamins, hundreds of huge enzymes and the limitations of Michaelis-Menten enzyme kinetics to explain the handling of a single carbon atom to produce and break down myelin and heme? Can we all remember how beta-oxidation feeds into the Kreb cycle now?
JR, MD, the fundamentalist, ex-professor and sure, why not trot out the old sheepskin to show that fundys do not meet your stereotype? I am soooo tired of the superficial bu----- that passes for understanding. This Presbyterean would rather hang out with a Bible thumping Southern Baptist than brothers who feel the pressure to compromise to seem not so anachronistic. Gimme that 'ol time religion, or else, put aside the latte and get yourself some Cuban cofee because it is going to get very specific. Just don't give me lukewarm. Be a man and take it or leave it.