That's fucking stupid

A while back I was on my local highstreet milling about. I was approached by a couple of young black kids who were preaching the word of their handlers the Lord to anyone who would listen. The conversation, quite predictably, came around to talk of evolution and creationism intelligent design and how apparently the scientific community has been lying to everyone for a great many years and have been hiding the flaws in the theory of evolution from the lay people. I was a little bored waiting for my partner to finish shopping so I engaged with these young lads and we had a very enlightening discussion where I tried to reason with them and they recited the script that they had memorised.

During the conversation they got quite excited on a number of occasions when I pointed out flaws in the traditional evolutionary theory. There is currently a lot of research which casts doubt on the selfish gene theory or at the very least modifies it to include the passing of learned traits through the generations. All of these doubts have been set upon by the fundies to ‘prove’ that the theory is absolute rubbish and a big bloke in the sky with a beard and a passion for child abuse is a more plausable explanation for the way things are today.

The point I was trying to make to deaf ears was that all along the road to scientific enlightenment is littered with debunked theories. They are theories because they have some evidence to support them but that does not make them fact. Science is a revisionary process, it starts with a hypothesis, an idea, and then evidence is gathered that supports it. Some times the evidence is there already and the hypothesis is created that then fits the evidence. Once this has been done and the hypothesis has been formed into a theory it is published to the wider scientific community who attempt to test it using their own reasoning.

My school had some very old text books and in some of them there were some rather strange theories about all manner of things. It used to be accepted that ‘negros’ and ‘orientals’ were separate sub species of human; that the smallest particles were protons electrons and neutrons. It was also accepted a little longer ago that the basic elements of the earth were fire, water, earth and air but these theories have been superceded by better explanations based on new evidence. There is no disrespect due to the authors of these old text books because based on the evidence available at the time many of their reasonings are sound. Science though, requires that all theories are constantly tested and results are compared to help us find better theories to explain the things around us.

I like that you have taken the time to read this blog, doing so suggests a thirst for answers, but I would hate to think that it was accepted blindly as truth. Many of the arguements and conflicts around the world are due to people taking things blindly on faith rather than questioning the information, gathering evidence for themselves and applying reason to make their own decisions.

I don’t know how we came to be here, by chance or by design. I suspect that nobody will every know the answer but having looked at the available evidence I have made up my own mind. My application of reason is this: evidence exists to support evolution and the scientific community is constantly working to improve the theory and gather evidence that either supports or debunks it. Intelligent design is a belief from one of those very old text books which was supported by the evidence available a few thousand years ago. The group who champion this belief are not prepared to challenge it themselves or revise it in the face of new evidence. The belief is entirely faith based and entirely incongruent with modern evidence, every rational and reasonable arguement that a rational and reasonable person may want to have with a believer is countered only with insistence that it is a matter of faith rather than one of evidence.

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