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Originally Posted by metaphor-  To illustrate: It was once believed that the earth was flat. Now it has been established for a certainty that it is spherical in shape. That is a fact. It was once believed that the earth was the center of the universe and that the heavens revolved around the earth. Now we know for sure that the earth revolves in an orbit around the sun. This, too, is a fact. Many things that were once only debated theories have been established by the evidence as solid fact, reality, truth.Science can not be fully trusted. |
Yet baseless facts from your holy book of choice can? double standards?
The only reason these were thought to be true at the time was that there was no other way to prove otherwise. If you can tell me how someone a millenia or so ago can scientifically test it id be glad to hear. As for the Earth as the center of the universe, that was a catholic doctrine, which science actually challenged rather then supported.
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Originally Posted by metaphor- Would an investigation of the evidence for evolution leave one on the same solid ground? Interestingly, ever since Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species was published in 1859, various aspects of the theory have been a matter of considerable disagreement even among top evolutionary scientists. Today, that dispute is more intense than ever. And it is enlightening to consider what advocates of evolution themselves are saying about the matter. |
No they arent... evolution is for the most part agreed upon by all evolutionists, it is only the fringes of the evolution scene where there is any real debate.
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Originally Posted by metaphor- Regarding the question of how life originated, astronomer Robert Jastrow said: “To their chagrin [scientists] have no clear-cut answer, because chemists have never succeeded in reproducing nature’s experiments on the creation of life out of nonliving matter. Scientists do not know how that happened.” He added: “Scientists have no proof that life was not the result of an act of creation.” |
This has absolutely nothing to do with Evolution, Evolution explains the diversity of life, not how it got here. The creation of life is handled by abiogenesis, there is much debate in this area but many various theories have been put forward.
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Originally Posted by metaphor- But the difficulty does not stop with the origin of life. Consider such body organs as the eye, the ear, the brain. All are staggering in their complexity, far more so than the most intricate man-made device. A problem for evolution has been the fact that all parts of such organs have to work together for sight, hearing or thinking to take place. Such organs would have been useless until all the individual parts were completed. So the question arises: Could the undirected element of chance that is thought to be a driving force of evolution have brought all these parts together at the right time to produce such elaborate mechanisms? |
They arent useless without all their parts, hell there are lineages of evolution for all three examples youve given. Ill give you one for the eye:
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iagram of eye evolution.jpg - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Some parts about our eye show that design is in fact not likely, for example our light sensitive regions face backwards, and would give us better vision if they faced forwards and didnt have capillaries in the way, it would also eliminate the "blind spot". Octopus eyes are apparently built in this way. Examples of the various steps of eye evolution can be seen in animals still alive today.
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Originally Posted by metaphor- Darwin acknowledged this as a problem. For example, he wrote: “To suppose that the eye . . . could have been formed by [evolution], seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.” More than a century has passed since then. Has the problem been solved? No. On the contrary, since Darwin’s time what has been learned about the eye shows that it is even more complex than he understood it to be. Thus Jastrow said: “The eye appears to have been designed; no designer of telescopes could have done better.” |
Thats an abhorrent misquote!:
To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.
Yet reason tells me, that if numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist; if further, the eye does vary ever so slightly, and the variations be inherited, which is certainly the case; and if any variation or modification in the organ be ever useful to an animal under changing conditions of life, then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection, though insuperable by our imagination, can hardly be considered real. Quote:
Originally Posted by metaphor- If this is so of the eye, what, then, of the human brain? Since even a simple machine does not evolve by chance, how can it be a fact that the infinitely more complex brain did? Jastrow concluded: “It is hard to accept the evolution of the human eye as a product of chance; it is even harder to accept the evolution of human intelligence as the product of random disruptions in the brain cells of our ancestors.” |
The human brain is just as easily explained as the eye, each bit is added slowly over millions of years. Give something half a billion years and its not hard to think of progressing from a few neurons, to the awesome power of the human mind.