So, I would disagree with you that the lack of understanding or knowledge of the evidence is the reason why a person rejects evolution.
Well, it's not me with whom you're disagreeing since that isn't what I said. I never said that all people, or even most people, will reject creationism based on the evidence. I used to believe that, but my several years on this very board has shown me that this is probably false.
I'm saying something very, very simple: of the people who have examined the evidence and then changed their positions based on this examination, the majority have moved from creationism to acceptance of evolution.
Now you've had training in mathematics and physics, so you understand how logic works. However, it is a tricky thing, I admit, to parse plain English into proper logic; in fact, I skip a section in a text book we use here because the sentences to be translated are too ambiguous to be useful as pedagogical exercises for people just learning about the subject. Perhaps my writing isn't very clear although I am trying to write my sentences in such a way to facillitate the translation into strict logic.
The subject of my comments is a particular group of people, which may in fact be a small group: those people who have examined the evidence concerning biological origins, and then changed their positions based on this examination.
I am not speaking about people who did not change their positions, nor am I speaking about people who changed their positions for reasons that have little to do with scientific facts.
I noted a pattern among this group: that is, most of these people made a switch from creationism to evolution, very few, if any, made a switch from evolution to creationism. Now, this observation may be in error: perhaps very few people ever changed from creationists to people who accepted evolution; maybe there are lots and lots of people who changed from being evolutionists to creationists. If either of these were true, then I admit that this would make my point unsound.
From my observation (which might be in error, but so far no one has challenged me on it -- perhaps someone would like to see if there is any kind of statistical evidence on this, other than my own anectdotal evidence), I conclude that the facts support evolution but not creationism. Of course, there are arguments that one can make against this conclusion, even assuming my observation is correct.
But you haven't made such an argument. As far as I can see, you are saying that there are people who have rejected Christianity for reasons that do not have to do with biological origins. But since I am discussing rejecting
creationism not
Christianity nor
religion, this is entirely irrelevant to my point. Although the majority of creationists are (at least here in the U.S.) evangelical Christians, not all Christians are creationists -- there are even conservative evangelicals who either accept evolution or who do not take a stand on this issue.
In fact, there are people who remain Christians, and there are even people who remain evangelical Christians, who did, upon examining the facts, change their position from creationism to evolution. So your comments about rejecting
Christianity don't seem to be relevant to the point I am trying to make.
Maybe you're making an entirely different point, and that's fine. However, it has very little to do with my point, which is about how WS-XYZ and whaler666 (or whatever their handles are -- I'm too lazy to look up the posts at this moment) claim that their points of view are so obvious that all anyone has to do is look at the facts objectively and come to the conclusions that they have reached. I am disputing that, namely that it is possible, and often happens, that people can examine the facts and reason them out and come to positions opposite to theirs; in fact, I am claiming that most of the people who do switch from the opposite position to theirs do so for reasons that have nothing to do with the facts or the reasonable inferences from those facts.
Q: If science doesn't know where this comes from, then couldn't it be God's doing?
A: The only difference between that kind of thinking and the stereotype of the savage who thinks the Great White Hunter is a God because he doesn't know how the hunter's cigarette lighter works is that the savage has an excuse for his ignorance. --
jhuger
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