What bothers me is how he treats evolution like its a belief and doesn't even discuss how people came to develop the concept. I suppose I'd be asking too much of most people to put their own beliefs aside to try to understand someone elses perspective. I think that the reason why people can be so against the idea of evolution is because it was explained to them by people who themselves actively disbelieved it, as well as didn't understand why those studying the history of life on earth have come to the conclusions they have. Polarizing issues like this is also how people justify rejecting ideas that are not what they were trained to believe.
I don't identify with my beliefs. If I discover something in reality that goes against something I had previously believed, I discard that belief for what is more useful; a way of understanding reality by means of analyzing my experience.
I'm not referring to Evolution vs. Creationism from a philosophical perspective. I'm referring to a way of practicing and systematically knowing an aspect of what we can gather information about.
Comparing evolution to creationism is like comparing apples to oranges. Creationism is a spiritual matter, where Evolution is a scientific matter. As far as traditional science is concerned, the two are independent of each other, and are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The argument begins when it is assumed that they are. Now the reason why I say 'as far as traditional science is concerned', is because there are developing theories in quantum mechanics that start to give room to ask questions about matters of spirituality, but lets not get ahead of ourselves here.
This urge that humans have to believe in something without proving whether or not it’s true is dangerous. It seems to me to border psychosis; instead of trying to figure out what is real, one prefers to simply look for something to believe in that makes them feel good. If Joe blow wants to believe that in order to keep the Easter bunny from killing him in his sleep he must leave jellybeans out on his porch, that’s fine, just don't go telling other people that cause they will think that Joe blow is nuts. But that would only be because Joe blow was the minority in his belief. If he managed to get others to believe this and eventually got most people believing this, then those who didn’t would then look crazy. This is why beliefs are not reliable; they are dependent on the proportion of individuals who believe in them.
I think that the reason why there is confusion about evolution is because the definitions that scientists use are not the same as what everyone else uses. In order for something to be considered a science, the scientific method must be able to be applied to it (it needs to be testable within the system of physical reality).
It has been common knowledge within the scientific community that evolution has occurred. This is proven by the evidence within the fossil record. Fossils can be compared and contrasted with each other. Their age can be determined through carbon dating and cross analyzed with which rock layer it was found in. The "theory of evolution" that people cling on to is actually the theory of HOW it occurred. A theory in science is something that has been tested and shown to work thus far, and has not yet been disproven. The reason why evolution is such a hard concept to swallow is because in order to really see descent with modification causing different species to occur, you have to look over substantially long periods of time, which are incomprehensible to the average intellect.
In order for creationism to even be considered a science it has to stand up to the scientific method. Can the scientific method be applied to the idea of creationism? The scientific method requires that the question posed can be tested with an experiment. What kind of experiment could be devised that would prove whether or not a deity created all the creatures of earth at the same time? Before we could even touch that one, we would have to prove that such a deity exists to begin with, since the question is assuming that one does exist. It’s like asking, "Do three-legged twagmuples poop in the forest?" Of course they don't because there’s no such thing; I just made them up. But one could find poop in the forest and say that it came from a three-legged twagmuple, and claim that as proof of their existence. That of course, would follow along the lines of psychosis.
Even if we do assume the existence of a deity that could create life, and work on the other part of the question; all creatures are immutable, we would then have to come up with an explanation for what we have already found in the fossil record, as well as why viruses are able to change to no longer be effected by the drugs we use to kill them, or why, if you look at the DNA of living organisms, you see that there are pieces that are identical when the DNA of two creatures are compared to each other, as if they were related. There are many other things to consider as well.
Maybe you didn’t even get this far to read this, but if you have, then maybe you are actually open minded. I'm not trying to tell people it’s wrong to believe in something. What I have included in this are things that I have concluded as a result of my own research on the subject. My original thought was how I was disappointed in my teacher for not being pragmatic about what he was teaching, and identifying with a belief that he believed to be against evolution. He preferred his own emotions over reasoning. The vast majority of humans do this. I work on not doing this. I wonder if this makes me less human.
