Creation = Christian

You've demonstrated repeatedly that you don't know what the Theory of Evolution is. No, it does not. Evolution provides the mechanism by which the frequency of alleles in a given population change over generation. This process is not "completely random." While mutation is a random event, it occurs only within the possibilities provided by the chemistry of DNA - that is, there are only so many base-pairs to choose from that are chemically compatible, and you can only add, subtract, or replace (or any combination of those).This random process is then controlled by the compeltely non-random process of natural selection. Organisms do not survive long enough to reproduce or die before passing on their genetic information due to chance. They do so depending on how well they are adapted to their environment. When one creature is eaten by a predator, and another had slightly better camouflage and was not seen, there is no chance involved. Obviously, the creature that was not seen will be the only one to pass along its genes...including those that caused the better camouflage. Over many generations, a population will see the frequency of certain traits change according to which random mutations worked better than others. Less successful or outright harmful mutations will decrease in frequency or disappear altogether. More successful mutations will increase in frequency.It's really quite easy to understand and obvious when observed in nature. There is none of this "pure chance" you speak of. Your understanding of evolution is wrong. No, it does not. No ape "mutated into a man." This is not what the Theory of Evolution states.Evolution predicts that modern apes and human beings have a common ancestor. This is very, very different from saying an ape "morphed" into a person, or even that an ape gave birth to a human being.Remmeber what we just discussed above, regarding how the frequency of traits changes in a population over generations? If you take a population and seperate it, giving each "child" population a slightly different environment and no way to interbreed (distance works just fine), the frequency of traits in each new population will begin to diverge. Differences will appear as each population is guided by natural selection in its new environment. This has been directly observed to occur both in nature and in the lab. Given sufficient generations, the two new populations will develop enough differences that we will call them different species, even though they came from the same original population many generations in the past.We have observed new species evolving in nature and in the lab. Again, this is a prcess that should be obvious - if natural selection is what guides the frequency of genetic traits, then different environments will select for different traits. Eventually populations with the same ancestors that now exist in different environments will grow apart into new species, and the differences will grow slightly with each passing generation. No, it does not. You're talking about the Big Bang, which is a cosmological theory having to do with physics and astronomy. Evolution is a biological theory. Evolution describes how, given existing life, the frequency of genetic traits will change over generations in a given population due to random mutation guided by natural selection. It has nothing to do with how life first formed (it works equally well if "god" creates the first living organism, or aliens seed the Earth with life, or if life arose spontaneously from an abiotic environment). It certainly has nothing to do with how the Universe first formed.But then, you don't even have the Big Bang model right. There was no such "particle," and there was no explosion in the conventional sense (the term "big bang" was originally made by a supporter of a then-competing model as a derogatory term, and it unfortunately stuck).The Big Bang model states that the spacial dimentions of the Universe are expanding like a balloon. The farther away an object is, the "faster" it is moving away from us. This is directly measured via the redshift of different celestial bodies (the wavelength of light is actually shifted to the red if the object is moving away. By measuring the redshift you can determine how rapidly the object is moving away from us). It's factual.The Big Bang model also makes the logical inference from this observed expansion that the Universe was "smaller" in the past. As you go farther back and approach T=0, the very "beginning" of time, the spacial dimensions and everything in the Universe become smaller and more dense, which also has the effect of heating it up to astronomical temperatures. This model has been used to predict such things as the Cosmic Microwave Background, an omnipresent leftover remnant of the extreme heat of the early Universe. What we found was exactly what the Big Bang model predicted we would find. There are other examples, but the Big Bang model has proven to be highly accurate.Note that I didn't say anything about a "particle" or an "explosion." The entire Universe was so small and dense that in its entirety it actually existed in a volume smaller than a single atom, but caling it a "particle" is misleading. it was the entire Universe compressed into a tiny state. Similarly, the Universe did not "explode" like a stick of dynamite. The spacial dimensions expanded, decreasing the density of the Universe and allowing it to cool down enough for conventional matter to form. This expansion is a basic property of the Universe as we understand it - the Universe simply expands, just like hydrogen and oxygen combust. Note that neither the Big Bang model nor the Theory of Evolution make any statement as to who or what, if anything, is responsible for the Universe, life, or its variety. They describe the mechanisms by which the Universe has reached its current state, and by which life has given rise to such variety, but neither theory says anything about a deity possibly being responsible for putting those processes into motion, or even directly guiding them.Science is strictly mute on "god" because we have no reason to mention one - there is no evidence it exists, and no evidence it does not exist. Science focuses on that for which there is testable evidence, and uses theories to describe observed processes, testing those models by falsifying their predictions. You can't do any of that with "god," but you can do that with the expansion of the Universe, or with the change in the frequency of alleles over generations in a living population. But it doesn't - the vast majority of Christians accept evolution as an accurate representation of the process by which life has changed over the span of its existence on Earth. They accept that the 6-day Creation story is a myth that describes Creation in a way that stone-age nomads could comprehend.Most Christians believe, as you do, that "god" created the Universe and everything in it. They simply also agree that science is slowly revealing how "god" did it.

You missed a great deal of the point. The predictions are used to test the model. Thus far, none of the predictions of the Theory of Evolution have been falsified. Every scrap of evidence we have discovered thus far has supported the evolutionary model. It has proven to be a highly accurate model.The physical evidence does directly show this link. Your statement regarding tobacco does nothing but show that you are ignoring everything that everyone is telling you - you still believe you have a decent grasp of evolution, and you do not.You are creating ludicrous strawman arguments and bashing down the straw men. Have fun doing that. If you'd like to discuss the actual Theory of Evolution, you are welcome to do so, but you're going to need to understand that your current conception of evolution is wrong. That's why it doesn't make any sense to you - the distorted version of evolution you're arguing against doesn't make sense, but it's also not the Theory of Evolution supported by science.You casually brought up the 23/24 chromosome issue with apes and humans. Were you aware that this is one of the strongest bits of evidence in favor of a common ancestor?To elaborate, modern apes have 24 chromosomes, and human beings have only 23. This should be disastrous for the idea that apes and humans have a common ancestor...unless one of the human chromosomes can be shown to be a fused version of two of the ape chromosomes. Evolution predicts that, if humans and apes have a common ancestor, they should have the same number of chromosomes. If humans have only 23 chromosomes and one is not a fusion of two, we cannot have a recent common ancestor.And this is exactly what we see - the human Chromosome 2 has a vestigial second centromere, where all other chromosomes have only one centromere. Chromosome 2 also posesses an extra pair of telomeres in the middle, where telomeres are always at the beginning and end of a chromosome.Somewhere after humans and apes split off from their common ancestor, two chromosomes fused in the pre-human population. This feature was passed on, until humans now have 23 chromosomes with Chromosome 2 being a fused version of two separate chromosomes. The predicion of the Theory of Evolution was confirmed to be correct. Once again, it has proven to be a highly accurate model. The very example you brought up in your strawman was one of the direct physical links between apes and humanity that you claimed do not exist.This example was one of the most astonishing and conclusive cases for showing that human beings and modern apes share a common ancestor. There are others, including the insanely high percentage of identical genetic information shared by chimpanzees, for example.

Then you aren't reading anything that people post in response to you. You specifically asked for "enlightenment," and we've given you what the Theory of Evolutuion actually says. Have you not understood what we've said? From the tone of your posts I suspect you're just ignorning what other people say.Here's the way this works:Either you can actually seek the truth as your name implies and learn about what the Theory of Evolution actually says, and then argue for or against from a position of knowledge rather than intentional ignorance...Or, you can continue to ignore what people say, continue to post horrendous strawman arguments, look like an idiot, and eventually work your way to suspensions and a ban for not actually participating in meaningful debate.I don't care whether you believe in evolution, but if you're going to argue against it, wouldn't it be more honest to actually understand what it is, first?I posted a rather long reply to your Message 4 explaining in detail your errors regarding the Theory of Evolution, and even a brief description of teh big Bang model. You don't seem to have actually read it, unfortunately, as you still don't understand why your statements in Message 4 have little or nothing to do with anything that could be called a "fact," or "reality."Would you care to actually participate in debate, and try to learn? Or would you like to continue to repeat the same mantra of "evolution is false, there is no evidence, no I haven't looked into it, see there's no case of a frog mutating into a bull so it's all false I win"?Many of us would be more than happy to help you learn what the Theory of Evolution actually states. We even have several real-life biologists on this board who use the principles of evolution literally every day in their work. Whether you choose to that evolution happens is not our primary concern, we would just like to have opponents who argue honestly rather than using "claims" of evolution that don't actually exist.

If you understood the points I made, then you would no longer be using strawman versions of evolution in your posts.What is this premise that you believe evolution stands on?Evolution requires three things:1) Living creatures that reproduce imperfectly (ie, mutations) and pass genetic information on to their offspring2) Limited resources3) TimeGiven these three things, changes in the frequency of any given trait in a population guided by natural selection are inevitable. Countless computer simulations of the process have been done given only duplications of those three things, and the change in the frequency of features is directly observable. Laboratory observations have duplicated the effect millions of times as well, taking a population into a new environment and observing as the frequency of given features changes compared to the original population. Direct observations in nature have confirmed the effect, from the camouflage changes int eh British Peppered Moth to the "superbug" diseases that have developed a resistance to specific antibiotics.What is the premise you disagree with?From the sound of it, you disagree with some of the predictions of evolution - that is, you would agree that all of these observations do in fact reflect that evolution occurs on a small scale. You would likely call it "adaptation within a kind," as that's what most Creationists seem to call it. But you disagree with common ancestry and timescales longer than a few thousand years.If that is the case, what is the mechanism that stops small-scale changes over a few generations from adding up to very large changes over many generations?Let me use yet another old analogy to bring the point to bear:Evolution is like walking. Each step you take causes a very small, sometimes imperceptible change in the scenery. Over many steps, like say walking from one city to another in the same general area, will cause noticeable changes in the scenery, but if you started in New York and walked to New Haven, CT, you wouldn't see a huge difference - the same species of trees and animals, similar architecture, etc. This is analogous to "microevolution," your "change within a kind." But what happens if you walk a long way? What if you walk all the way to the Arizona desert? Now, the scenery is very different. The plants and animals are almost completely different, the climate is different, the ground looks different, the architecture of buildings is different...and yet each step along the entire journey was very small. This is analogous to "macroevolution," which you are claiming is impossible.Given small inheritable changes each generation (which is observed fact), it is inevitable that the small changes will eventually add up to large changes over many generations, unless there is a mechanism preventing large changes from adding up.Do you have such a mechanism? Do you have a reason you disagree with evolution, something that actually falsifies the model? Or do you disagree with it based only on your subjective religious beliefs, with no actual evidence whatsoever?You're certainly welcome to believe whatever you'd like, but if you have no real evidence to falsify evolution, and instead disagree only based on subjective religious beliefs, then discussion is somewhat moot. I can show you direct, observed evidence that evolution is factual. I've even done so in this thread. But if you only accept those theories that are 100% compatible with your subjective beliefs, even when shown direct evidence to the contrary, then there is no further point in debating.Of course, if that's the case, you'll also need to pretend that all of modern astronomy, geology, archeology, paleontology, physics, chemistry and the very idea of logical inferences are completely false as well, as they disagree with the literal Biblical Creation story as well.