I watched way too much TV when I was a child. Now, I don’t watch much, but during Christmas vacation time, I watched some. While visiting my parents, I took advantage of their satellite TV subscription and watched The Discovery Channel and The National Geographic Channel a while. One thing that struck me about National Geographic, besides their great photography and videography and interesting stories, was their zealous promotion of the religion of macroevolution as scientific fact. It was really disappointing to see them publicly display their ignorance.
Good science, unlike religious faith, is all about seeing first, then believing. Of course, there is a great deal of mathematical extrapolation and application of theories involved, but to be really acceptable as science, at least to my way of thinking, theories have to be supportable with observation and experimentation, and not contradicted by observation and experimentation.
One kind of evolution, microevolution, is supportable as a valid scientific theory. Another kind of evolution, macroevolution, is not. Microevolution is adaptation of a species by selective breeding. The selection process may be by people or natural forces. The key characteristic of microevolution is that you never change one kind of animal into another kind. In other words, you can, given enough generations, come up with blue parakeets from green-and-yellow parakeets, or even toy poodles from wolves. We see natural examples in mutations of various viruses, etc., even in the absence of human intervention. Microevolution is observed in nature. Selective breeding is even in the Bible (Genesis 30). I believe it works. It is observable.
Macroevolution, on the other hand, is the religious theory that all biological life, including humans, evolved by selective breeding and mutation from some simple “soup” of basic amino acids, without any intelligent creative action or spiritual forces. I do not believe this “goo to you by way of the zoo” theory. It seems to me to be nothing more than a lame attempt to deny the existence of God, and therefore escape the responsibilities we have towards Him. Nobody has ever synthesized a real animal, even a single-cell animal, from realistic conditions simulating likely pre-life conditions on Earth. If one kind of animal actually could be transformed into another kind (i. e. fish to bird or reptile to mammal) by selective breeding, and if that actually explained the existence of the variety of animals on Earth, then we would see a much greater variety of species on this planet. There would be more kinds of trunked animals than tapirs, elephants, and mammoths, for example. There would be more kinds of apes. There would be lots of things in between birds and reptiles. There would be biological chaos, really… three-legged and five-legged creatures and such.
The usual “proof” for macroevolution is to make a strong case for microevolution, then claim that proves macroevolution. I don’t think so. If I’m going to have to accept something on faith, I would at least like to have a credible basis for that faith, like the character and nature of God Himself.
For the real truth, see the first couple of chapters of Genesis.