Ask just about anybody, I am a nice person....not to mention extremely non-confrontational. However, there are two things that I would happily enter into a friendly debate with anyone about: God and evolution. Yup, they do exist! Both of them. And quite happily I would add.
I am currently reading/rereading a book on the matter.....it's the best "textbook" that was ever assigned to me in college: Finding Darwin's God: A Scientist's Search For Common Ground Between God and Evolution by Kenneth Miller. In this book, Miller convincingly constructs an argument against both those who deny evolution as well as those using science to justify a materialist worldview. I absolutely love the way that he uses the mechanisms of evolution to point to an all-powerful creator. It makes me even more awestruck that we have such an amazing God.
There are soooo many incredible arguments that I wish I could syphon straight from the book to your brain, but since I can't do that, I will share a sample from my last night's reading (it's kinda long....but you should stick it out anyway):
"To an anti-evolutionist, when new species appear in the fossil record....it must be a product of design. This makes the fossil record a tool for recording the actions of the designer. We must say, then, that it pleased the designer to design only microorganisms for nearly 2 billion years of earth's history. He then began to tinker with multicellular organisms, poducing a bewildering variety of organisms that survived only briefly. In the Cambrian era, roughly 530 million years ago, the designer produced an extraordinary variety of multicellular organisms, many of which were the first representatives of what we now regard as the animal phyla....Even in the Cambrian, he was not yet interested in designing a vertebrate....That came later.
Then, as we have seen, the designer produced one organism after another in places and in sequences that would later be misinterpreted as evolution by one of his creatures. And just to compound that misinterpretation, he would ensure that the very first limbs he designed looked like modified fins, and that the first jaws he designed looked like modified gill arches. He would further ensure that the first tetrapods had tail fins, like fish, and that the first birds had teeth, like reptiles. So thoughtful was this designer that after having designed mammals to live exclusively on the land, he would redesign a few, like whales and dolphins, to live in water - but not before he designed creatures that were literally halfway between land and swimming mammals. In working this magic, the designer chose to create forms truly intermediate between walking and swimming mammals.
It would be nice to pretend that this description is nothing more than an irreverent polemic, a nasty poke at the opposition. But it's not. It is a fair description of just a tiny bit of what any advocate of intelligent design must believe in order to square such beliefs with the facts of geological history. And this is just the beginning.
Intelligent design advocates have to account for patterns in the designer's work that clearly give the appearance of evolution. Is the designer being deceptive? Is there a reason why he can't get it right the first time? Is the designer, despite all his powers, a slow learner? He must be clever enough to design an African elephant, but apparently not so clever that he can do it the first time. Therefore we find the fossils of a couple dozen extinct almost-elephants over the last few million years. What are these failed experiments, and why does this master designer need to drive so many of his masterpieces to extinction?
Intelligent design does a terrible disservice to God by casting him as a magician who periodically creates and creates and then creates again throughout the geologic ages. Those who believe that the sole purpose of the creator was the production of the human species must answer a simple question - not because I have asked it, but because it is demanded by natural history itself. Why did this magician, in order to produce the contemporary world, find it necessary to create and destroy creatures, habitats, and ecosystems millions of times over?
I have no doubt that some will read these questions as blasphemous. How dare I (or anyone) question the motives of God? But keep in mind who is really reponsible for dragging the designer into the crucible of science. If we wish to make sense of natural history by invoking the miraculous to account for life's every twist and turn - and that is exactly what [believers of intelligent design] wishe to do - then it is the invoker himself who has presented in court the motives of the Creator. It is the advocate of design who wants to hold his designer responsible for every detail of life. Ironically he's the one, not the evolutionist, who has made these questions necessary.
In the final analysis, God is not a magician who works cheap tricks. Rather, His magic lies in the fabric of the universe itself. The fossil record is not a series of sequential tricks fabricated for no purpose other than to mislead. The fossil record represents, with all of its imperfections, an epic of evolutionary change, the history of life on this planet grand in its range and diversity and magnificent in its detail. It is the record of the historical process that led to us. It is the real thing, and so are we."I mean think about it! Isn't a God that designs the mechanisms of evolution smarter than the God that an advocate of intelligent design depicts? Seriously! Read this book! Come to understand how ingenious and amazingly cool evolution is and know that GOD set it all into motion for HIS glory....and that all things, including evolution, work for His ultimate good plan.
