[QUOTE=Bohemianwrapsody;57272797]
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Originally Posted by stremba70
My point is that if both things are faith based I’d rather trust the one admitting to being that..
You are right in your contention for wanting more proof.. I think it’s fare to want more proof on both sides. But I also think it’s a false paradigm and maybe the answer is we don’t know.
I’ll just say that I think the proof and evidence is strongest when science and Spirituality work together.
Before you claim evolution to be faith based, specifically what evidence do you think is missing? Specifically what would you expect to see if evolution is true that isn’t seen? If you answer that, then several options exist:
1 The evidence you are looking for isn’t really missing; you are just unaware of it. There’s no shame in this. There’s a ton of scientific findings that go largely unreported and are of interest only to specialists in the field. If you share what you’re looking for, perhaps someone can guide you to it.
2. The evidence you seek is not really something that is expected to be observed if evolution is true. A good example is the “missing link”, understood to be a single fossil find that definitively links human and apes. There won’t be such a thing found.because such a thing doesn’t exist and should not exist if evolution is true. There should just be a whole bunch of fossils found that have a blend of human and ape like features, some leaning more toward human like, some shading more toward ape like. That’s exactly what the fossil record shows.
3. You have actually found a real gap in the supporting evidence for evolution. Given that many scientists have devoted their careers to studying evolution and looking for evidence for it, this seems unlikely, but it’s possible. One gap, though. doesn’t destroy the theory. There are still multiple independent lines of evidence that support evolution.
You say you want proof, but science can’t give you proof. Science can only look at some part of the universe and come up with explanations for why that part of the universe is the way it is. Good explanations though lead to predictions of what you will find if you look for other evidence. As a general prediction, for instance, evolution predicts that 100 million year old fossils will not resemble modern mammals. A more specific prediction is that we will find fossils with blends of bird and reptilian features, ones with mammalian and reptilian features, but never ones with blends of bird and mammalian features. An even more specific one is that we will find the same viral DNA insertions in the genomes of gorillas, chimps and humans. We will find other such insertions shared in the genomes of humans and chimps. We will find no such insertions shared by gorillas and chimps, but lacking in humans. Nor will we find ones shared by humans and gorillas but not found in chimps.
All of these predictions have to date been borne out by observation. There are many more. Any alternative explanation has to deal with these observations as a starting point. It has to make other predictions, things that would not be predicted by evolution, that can be checked and verified. Until such an alternative is presented and shown to explain observations better than evolution, evolution will continue to be the scientific consensus theory of how biodiversity developed.