Evolution is “just a theory”.
…and the only people who say that are those who don’t understand what a scientific theory is. So, allow me…
A theory is not a guess. It’s not a shot in the dark. No one is pulling wild ideas from nowhere. A theory is “the best possible explanation for a phenomenon, taking into account all relevant data” THAT is a theory. Evolution is a fact. We know it exists, we know it occurs. How, why & by what mechanisms does it occur, is the unanswered question.

Evolution can’t disprove God.
It’s not meant to. EVOLUTION HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH GOD OR THE ORIGINS OF LIFE
It is simply the explanation how how life evolves ONCE it exists.

There is no evidence in the fossil record/no transitional species.
This argument is pure b.s. There are literally millions of pieces of evidence in the form of archeological studies & reports that confirm evolution, plus dozens of transitional species.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_transitional_fossils

The debate over evolution is almost purely an American phenomenon. The scientific community the world over has accepted evolution as a scientific fact, while here in good ol’ Uh-mur-i-kuh we continue to drag our knuckles in the dirt & shake sticks at the moon.

Reality doesn’t give a damn what you want to believe. It is what it is, whether you like it or not. It’s pure human arrogance that would suggest otherwise. Therefore, we must alter our beliefs to coincide with the laws of the natural world, instead of insisting that reality bend to accommodate our ignorant, primitive egos.

Yes, that’s right. Nature is a dictatorship & we all must obey it’s laws. We have no other choice. (I challenge you to try to break the law of gravity. can’t do it.) Which, by the way, yes, gravity is both a theory & a law. The difference being that the LAW of gravity is “matter attracts matter”, while the theory is “WHY does matter attract matter?”

Nope, it doesn’t. Neither does it disprove that Grandpa Munster is alive and well and running a taco stand on Venus.

Evolution is far from proven is you look at things like fossils that cross layers that are supposed to be thousands of years each and like I said, Y’all think the first chicken came from a lizard/chicken thing…

There is no evidence of such creatures.

Like I said, evolution answers many questions but to me, not the most important ones. Evolution also doesn’t disprove a God that is bigger than Space/Time and more Powerful than all the energy/matter in the Universe.

How sad that you think you do not have to address these things…

No wonder you can not build confidence amongst your peers…

Every scientist, rather than being neutral and objective, is biased to some degree. Somebody like Louis Leakey does not randomly pick a spot on the globe, start digging a hole and see what turns up. He believed that there was a missing link based off his a priori adoption of the evolutionary model, and went out to prove what he “knew” to be true.

“in July of 1959, paleontologist Louis Leakey found a bit of a skull bone and teeth in Nairobi, Kenya. He said, “We knelt together to examine this treasure… and cried with sheer joy. For years people had been telling us that we’d better stop looking, but I felt deep down that it had to be there. You must be patient about these things.”

Stop giving us the impression that you are white gods in lab coats, you are biased human beings and must be able to be subjected to cross examination. Of course, it’s convenient to predefine anybody who holds a different theory as therefore not a scientist. Opposition stifled.

“I had motive for not wanting the world to have a meaning; consequently assumed that it had none, and was able without any difficulty to find satisfying reasons for this assumption. The philosopher who finds no meaning in the world is not concerned exclusively with a problem in pure metaphysics, he is also concerned to prove that there is no valid reason why he personally should not do as he wants to do, or why his friends should not seize political power and govern in the way that they find most advantageous to themselves. … For myself, the philosophy of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation, sexual and political.” –Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means (London: Chatto & Windus, 1946), pp. 270, 273.”

The whole ideal that this is a battle of faith vs. science is uneducated. Both sides have philisophical presuppositions before they even begin to look at the facts. These intellectual pre-commitments oftentimes cannot be subjected to scientific scrutiny and hence are religious in nature. The question is, “Who has the right bias?” Of course, most evolutionaists are dedicated to the a priori belief of naturalism, discounting the super-natural, yet, cannot defend foundational elements of their theory (the origin of life, the source of matter, etc.) with purely naturalistic assumptions. The same applies to myself as a creationist, but at least I admit it.

Maybe the reason that evolutionary scientists are so grumpy is because they can’t answer basic questions, such as why we find polystrata fossils running through millions of years worth of geological layers? I love reading on both sides of this issue, and honestly think that the elitist scientists need their “ivory towers” to keep their theory going. Nobody likes having the comfort of the “known” questioned, but such should be the life of the scientist.

@Geoffrey (#21). Perhaps you might want to say that a little differently. Evolution is still considered a scientific theory, not a scientific law. That I use the proper term for it is not a problem at all.

In closing, the point to my post, which seems to have gotten lost, is that the way evolution is taught in schools is a key reason why it is not as accepted as it should be. Were it taught properly, I believe that there would be far fewer people who would argue against it.

I’m not sure why the comments here would surprise you. True scientists are people, too, and tend to get grumpy when people who don’t know what they’re talking about talk as though their opinion is of the same weight as an expert (like #34′s whining about ivory towers). Engineers can get even grumpier than scientists! In any case, there isn’t an expectation of civility like a priest might have, just the level of civility from any other random person. We’ll say hello to the greeter at Walmart without feeling obligated to take his opinions on science education seriously.

Where life began, abiogenesis, isn’t normally dealt with a whole lot in high school biology curricula. We’re talking about evolution here, which is after ‘the spark of life’ occured. But, no, theories and hyptheses do not require faith. That’s the whole point of the empirical method, and to equate it with faith is to do a disservice to both ideas. One tests science with joy, testing one’s faith is supposed to be rather dour and involves a great deal more navel gazing. The results tend to be less practical as well.

@number 7 – thank you for posting! i couldnt believe my eyes when someone said gravity was a theory! I dropped my coffee cup in suprise. I guess it only “theoretically” fell to the floor!