formerdriver A few points:
1) You don’t know my religious opinions. There are many Christians who accept evolution. Almost all Christians accept that the Earth is round and orbits the Sun despite the Bible’s plain words to the contrary. I don’t know why evolution is different.
My profession is physics. Jesus had nothing to say about it. He was not concerned with this world, but that to come.
The Bible doesn’t tell blacksmiths how to make steel, chariot makers how big the wheels should be, house builders that flat roofs and thick walls make cooler houses in the Middle East.
Neither physics, nor evolution, will tell me how I should live. They can only describe the world as it is, not as it should be.
If I had an ethical problem, I wouldn’t write Stephen Hawking or Richard Dawkins about it.
2) You can accept the cats–good. One small change. Evolution by natural selection is just the sum of bazillions of them over a huge length of time.
You can accept that 1 + 1 = 2, but not that 1 + 782345698612935 = 782345698612936. Okay, fine.
But you’ve never seen an electron, or a germ, or an electromagnetic wave. You’ve never seen gravity, or time appear to slow down for objects moving faster than you. Those things may be absurd to you, but the people who know all about those things and work with them every day have used them to come up with other things that you take for granted every day. And their predictions work.
The reason that a lot of people who defend evolution get testy is that it’s always the same arguments over and over again from people who usually don’t even get what they’re arguing about.
Physicists have the equivalent, the “free energy” people. Check out keelynet sometime.
They say all the same things–it’s a conspiracy, physicists are too lazy/dogmatic/whatever to listen to what they have to say.
And we have work to do. We don’t have the time or the inclination to debunk every claim that somebody can get more energy out of a system than went in. All we can do is say, “Look, this is where we got assuming energy was conserved. You go do your own science where it isn’t, and when you invent transistors with it or something, get back to us.”
And so I understand the tetchiness. We’re human. We SHOULD have infinite patience to explain over and over what we spend our lives studying to answer the objections of people who don’t pay any attention to our work, but we don’t.
You think evolution is bad science, fine. Invent your proper science. Can’t get universities to listen? Teach it at Oral Roberts. When Oral Roberts starts coming up with inventions and whatnot that no other university can touch, the scientists will listen.
3) Argument from design is inherently contradictory.
You say complicated things can’t come from simple things. They can’t be assumed, they must be explained by something more complicated. Fine, you invoke a Designer.
But the Designer is also complicated, more complicated than what you are trying to explain by it-that’s your assumption. By your own rules, now the Designer needs a Designer.
If the Designer can be assumed, then why can’t I assume that life came about spontaneously and cut out the middleman of a Designer? If you’re not obligated to explain where your Designer comes from, how can you honestly demand that I explain where life came from?
