Depends on what you mean by evolution. Micro evolution is fact, macro is not. There is a huge different between the too. Micro is a variation within a certain kind of animal (dog, wolf, coyote, will always be a dog) macro evolution is a different kind of change, it breaks the limits and turns into another kind of animal altogether.
I think you still have not read what I mean by evolution - the divergence of animals so that they are no longer of one species. We are all, essentially, of one 'kind' by your definition, Carbon based earth dwelling cellular organisms.
Besides, saying that something os of one kind is nonsense unless you can say how you define what that kind is, and how you go about deciding which 'kind' an animal or plant is.
This not only doesn't help, nor does it in any way disprove evolution, but it is not in any way supported by evidence, I'm afraid.
Huge difference, and they are far from one in the same.
No, you don't want them to be the same. Even by your definition, "macro evolution" happens - the separation of animals so that they can no longer interbreed, and become different species. How would you define this new concept of 'macro evolution'? Remember, if it includes forming new kinds, you need to be able to define what a kind is.
Again see my above. Macro and micro are big differences, one is just a variation within a kind, another says the changes are unlimited and organisms can turn into completely different organisms given the time. I strongly believe dogs will always produce dogs, they may variate and some may to a point where they can't interbreed, but it will always be a dog.
This is true, but the KIND of animal is still the same. The didn't and no matter how much time given will not become a different animal. At least that's not in the realm of science to discuss.
Well, in a sense you are correct. Any descendant of a dog will always have a dog as its ancestor, this much is fairly obvious. What you are wrong to state is that a dog is not part of a greater whole that everything evolved from.
Your strongly believing doesn't change this. all you are doing is defining a kind as a level up the taxonomic scale, but it still doesn't hold to be the end of the theory. Whatever is evolved from a god will always be a descendant of a dog, and so, in a sense, be of dog 'kind'. However, since dogs and cats and all other mammals are descended from one type of animal originally, they are all of mammal 'kind'. In turn, all mammals and plants are of multicellular 'kind'. All multicellular and monocellular life are of carbon based life form 'kind'. It is true that one 'kind' will never evolve into another 'kind', but it is equally true that all life is of one, ultimate kind, that we all evolved from.
All you are saying through talk of God creating kinds is that evolution didn't do the evolving as far as dogs, but has done since. There is of course no reason to believe this, nor is there any way that what you are saying denies evolution happening. What you have described is what you seem so against - your so called 'macro' evolution.
Simply not true until you can prove macro-evolution occurs scientifically.
Some teachers (I'm not accusing you) present micro-evolution as fact, and they rightfully do so, but when they try to sneak in something much bigger behind it (all organisms have a common ancestor because of micro evolution) that's where I draw the line. There are limits. You keep stating they're one in the same, where is the evidence? In the past 6,000 years we observed dogs produce dogs. The exact way that this happens isn't totally understood, like anything else in science.
OK, lets start from the beginning again. Your definition of micro evolution includes the ability to make new species, which is defined as creatures which cannot interbreed to produce fertile offspring. What you deny is the ability to make new kinds. You therefore define 'macro' evolution (since no scientific definition has ever been needed as there is no such individual entity) as the creation of a new 'kind' (of which, again, there is no scientific definition) through the process of evolution. Correct?
The problem is that you are, in a sense correct, but misunderstand that the only way that kind can be defined as such a way as for this to be true is to be descended from a common ancestor. Thus, all life is a single 'kind', animal is a sub-kind, mammal is a sub-sub-kind, and so on, until you get to canine, then dog. Well done, you have just discovered taxonomic structuring of life.
This is what evolution is. It is only by stating that kinds were created at a certain point that you deny that this idea of macro evolution exists, but you have misunderstood what evolution is. You have stated that new species separate out to form separate species. You then said that a species can not cross 'kinds' - a dog cannot become a cat for example. All kinds must be descendants of a common kind. This is true, but the point is that the further up you go, the further back you have to go to find what the kind is that links us all. Why do you say that it is OK for a dog to give us dogs, coyotes, and wolves, but not for an earlier mammal to give us cats and dogs? How do you decide that a dog is a kind, and not say a coyote is the kind? It doesn't make sense as not only do you not have a system whereby you can reliably say what level a 'kind' is at, science already has, and by your reasoning the only way it can be accurate with the way the world works is for the 'kind' to be life.
This is why there is no difference between micro and macro evolution. If a dog can evolve into a coyote, and this is micro-evolution, why can species before a dog not evolve into the dog species, and this be called micro evolution? How is this in any way a different process? It is not in any way different. It's just the higher up the taxonomic scale you go, the further back you have to go to find out when the creature existed who gave rise to that kind. Ultimately, if you go back far enough, you'd find a single celled organism that was the ultimate ancestor of us all, and gave birth to 'life' kind.
I Disagree. It's a theory that tries to prove all organisms have a common ancestor. It's not so much how, you can't assume it did happen then find out how it could have happened (most evidence I do find it how it might have happened) prove with science that it actually did!
It is not quite how you put it. We did not decide that it happened arbitrarily that it happened, then try to figure out how and if it did. The ability to study small changes in DNA through generations, and survival of the fittest being seen in species show us that a species can evolve. As I explained above, this will, over long time periods lead to the creation of at least two descendant species, who will then diverge and so on. This mean that life must, originally, have had one ancestor who was at the start of the chain. Geological fossil records and other evidence show us that it has happened, that we have evolved, and that the further back we go the more common the ancestors are.
We THEN need to figure out how it happened, by which we mean that there have been times of slow change and times of fast change, and we're not sure why. There are other things we do not know about how it happened, but a lack of knowledge about something does not make the rest of it untrue. What we know is that it happened, and a lot about how, just not all about how.
Chances of life happening are irrelevant to evolution. We don't know how life started, but that is not what the theory of evolution is. The theory of evolution, in itself will quite allow for God to have created the first cell, for example, and that have no bearing on evolution at all.
That said, the chances of it happening are impossible to figure out without knowing it just happened. What we can be fairly sure of is that it didn't just all suddenly happen that in one second there was suddenly self replicating life, at least, not by our current definitions of life.
What seems more likely is that naturally occurring chemicals cause other chemicals to become like themselves, through purely chemical reactions. This can happen with actually very basic molecules, not nearly as complicated as cells alive today. Like a prion protein for example, only less complicated again. These sort of molecules are not alive, but actually quite likely to occur.
Through lightening, UV radiation damage, volcanic heat, or any other of a multitude of physical phenomena can cause these molecules to subtly change, bond with each other, change chemical composition. Most will lose all their ability to chemically change other molecules to become like themselves, but one in a million becomes more complex, and more able to change other molecules into itself. This one is more able to do this than the precursor molecule, so this one becomes the dominant molecule, as these molecules that they are turning into themselves are used up.
This process gets these molecules more and more complex, until they are a variety of molecules working together. Eventually they come together to for life.
Now that is a really bad explanation of the process, but it comes down to this. All you need for life to form is a molecule able to change other molecules around it, in an environment able to change that molecule. This scenario is not only less unlikely than your assumption of how evolutionists think life came about, but is actually unlikely to NOT happen, given the amount of molecules there are in the universe. This scenario is a near certainty to happen somewhere in the universe.
I.D should not replace evolution, but should be mentioned briefly alongside evolution. Evolution is the best theory governing how living things develop over time... however, it doesn't deal with how it all started in the first place.
Indeed it does not teach how it happened. That is other theories, the most likely of which is outlined above.
So (a) how do you define science?
Actually not that hard. Science is the study of the world through the scientific method. I really can't be bothered to type that out here, so see
this article on Wikipedia to see what this is, and then feel free to ask again if you don't see why this is not what ID is.
and (b) so if I say "it all started with a Big Bang", that is acceptable science, but if I say "God created it.", it is a big lie?
Not so much a lie, but not a hypothesis testable by the scientific method. If you say God did it in a certain way, and that if that way were true then (a) or (b) would be true, and we can test if (a) or (b) are true, then that would be a scientific hypothesis. If it was wrong, it would be possible to show it to be such.
So to say "God did it" is not necessarily wrong, just not scientific or testable.
I don't understand why this should be such a big issue- if a teacher in a biology or geology class, in the course of going over various origin theories, states something like "Science can't really explain how the Universe actually began, or how the first living cell capable of reproducing itself came to be, which is why some people believe that the universe is like looking at a watch- its very existence implies an intelligent universe maker.", is that really all that bad? Would that be sufficient reason to boycott the school or fire the teacher?
There are two points here worth addressing. Firstly is what "science" can and cannot explain. Science is a method by which we seek to explain things, not an entity in itself. Thus science cannot tell us anything, rather that we can use it to test out ideas to see if they hold up to scrutiny. Because we have not got all the answers yet does not mean that "science cannot tell us how...", just that we do not know yet. We may never do, or we may somehow find out in the next decade, but our use of science potentially can tell us how the universe began.
Our current lack of knowledge is very different from saying that the scientific method is incapable of telling us how the universe or life began, which, as our understanding continues to increase, it may well do.
Secondly, it would be wrong to say that "the universe's very existence implies an intelligent universe maker". It does not imply that any more than the existence of a rock implies that volcanic activity is intelligent or in any way sentient at all. For that exact rock, with that exact atomic structure to have come into being at that exact tie was INCREDIBLY unlikely. I mean that rock has a more complicated atomic structure of the first life forms. How could it have happened that way? Was the volcanic activity that created it intelligent?
There is, similarly, no reason to believe, that if the universe was created rather than existing in cyclical eons of time, ever expanding and contracting, there is still no reason to suspect that however it was created was through an intelligent maker. That is simply something that science cannot comment on. The chances of us existing exactly as we are were minute, just as the chances of our hypothetical rock existing exactly as it does. But that doesn't mean that it didn't happen, does it?
Again, in a past era, religious and science were taught together and I don't think students had difficulties distinguishing which was which, or felt misled.
You don't? What do you base your thoughts on what they felt on?
The problem with that is that we have, in the past and to some degree even now used God to explain what we don't understand. We use this as part of our definition of God, such as in the ID argument. We have problems though when we realise how these things happen. Does that mean that there is now no longer room for God there? If we view God as being the missing link in our gaps of knowledge then it is quite legitimate to say that science is disproving him as we understand what these gaps in our knowledge really are. If we can now look back on things people didn't understand and allocated to God, but which we now know to be, for example, due to bacteria, and say that it was always a natural process all along, why can't we say that this is true of other things we don't know yet, as people should have said of disease when attributing it all to demons and sprits because they had no idea that bacteria existed?
There, that took ages to post, hopefully sorted out a few misconceptions, but I am now having a breather!