Quote Originally Posted by ahabion
agreed that darwin did offer another possibility into how things were to be and there is some scientific background to back up his reasoning... like the iguanas on the galopagos islands and some species of birds, hence came the theory of evolution.

But evolution itself is still a theory, not a fact. True that the iguanas on the the islands lived because those that knew how to swim and those with longer claws survived to breed... those that didnt, of course died (natural selection) But it still doesnt go to show how we came from a gelatinous compound into human beings. Or how dinasaurs became birds or how a cow became a whale and/or vice versa. Bones are being excavated of so called "eve" skeletal structures that suggest that we may have had a "monkey" like evolutionary process, but again, those bones that they are finding are scattered which suggest they could have been deformaties and outcast from their tribes. Drawing the same parallel, with dinasaurs and birds... yes dinasaurs are maybe more closely related to birds, but where is the evolutionary process which suggest that... meaning if we are finding bones of the human evolutionary process, which of course takes millions of years, why are we not finding the other (dinosaurs, cows, whales, etc.) evolutionary processes as well? Its all still theorized and is still open, which the same can be said about a Religious belief in an omnicient being. So i'm not banging on evolutionist/scientologist, just answering the the thread "For those that don't like God..." and the why part of it.
In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"--part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is "only" a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science--that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."
Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory--natural selection--to explain the mechanism of evolution.