creationists, do you think it's an insult to call evolution "just a theory"?

Question

dodging the question Max?

Answer 1

It takes a long time for a new idea in science to attain the exalted status of "scientific theory". People commonly say that Darwin proposed the theory of evolution. That is not correct. Darwin proposed a hypothesis, a possible explanation for certain realities he had personally observed. However, it took many years, much intense research by hundreds of other scientists, and the accumulation of many thousands of pieces of scientific evidence before that hypothesis was accepted as a full-fledged scientific theory.

At this point in time, evolution remains technically a theory, just like the existence of atoms is technically a theory, but both these theories are so thoroughly supported by solid scientific evidence that for all practical purposes they can be taken as fact. Which allows atomic theory to serve as the foundation and unifying principle for all of science, and biological evolution to serve as the foundation and unifying principle for all of the life sciences. The wonders of God's Creation never cease to give glory to their Designer!

Answer 2

Creationists don't know what the word "theory" means.

I don't think they believe "just a theory" an insult so much as a tactic to down play the evolutionary model so that they can try to pass off their b.s. BELIEF (a.k.a NOT THEORY) off as a valid model for reality.

I'm just guessing though, I probably shouldn't have answered this question because I'm not a creationist as you might have guessed.

Answer 3

A theory is "a coherent group of general propositions used as principles of explanation for a class of phenomena" [Random House American College Dictionary]. The term does not imply tentativeness or lack of certainty. For instance Human Sexual Reproduction is the theory that explains where babies come from.

When people say something is "Just a Theory" it only means they never learned the basic vocabulary of science.

Answer 4

no, i don't think it's an insult; scientists who believe in evolution will still call a theory.


why it's being taught in my science book as something else, i'm not sure...

Answer 5

nope... cause that's all it is a theory.

Answer 6

Seek the Lord while He may be found.

Do not mock Him, judgment shall come woe unto you mockers and doubters.

Answer 7

No, I think that it is a complement to call such a far fetched stretch of the imagination a theory. The so called theory of macro-evolution is itself evolving as scientists who are committed to explaining everything through purely materialistic causes find themselves in a desperate scramble to come up with ever fanciful "just so" stories to accommodate recent discoveries about the complexity of design and the coded information contained in a single living cell.

"Although the tiniest bacterial cells are incredibly small, each is in effect a veritable microminiaturized factory containing thousands of exquisitely designed pieces of intricate molecular machinery, made up of 100,000,000,000 atoms, far more complicated than any machine built by man and absolutely without parallel in the nonliving world."4

The "simple cell" turns out to be a miniaturized city of unparalleled complexity and adaptive design, including automated assembly plants and processing units featuring robot machines (protein molecules with as many as 3,000 atoms each in three-dimensional configurations) manufacturing hundreds of thousands of specific types of products. The system design exploits artificial languages and decoding systems, memory banks for information storage, elegant control systems regulating the automated assembly of components, error correction techniques and proofreading devices for quality control.

An elegant design is more than the parts themselves: it involves information. It requires information input external to the design itself - and the deliberate involvement of a Designer.

The Darwinians cannot explain the origin of life because they cannot account for the origin of information. The technology that provides language - semantics and syntax, for example - is quite distinct from the technology of the ink and paper it may be written on. The physical features of the circuits in a computer provide no clue about the design of the software that resides within it.

At the moment of conception, a fertilized human egg is about the size of a pinhead. Yet it contains information equivalent to about six billion "chemical letters." This is enough information to fill 1000 books, 500 pages thick with print so small you would need a microscope to read it!

If all the chemical "letters" in the human body were printed in books, it is estimated they would fill the Grand Canyon fifty times!

"Rudyard Kipling, in addition to his journalism, adventure stories, and chronicling of the British Raj in India, is remembered for a series of charming children’s tales about the origins of animals. The Just-So Stories (1902) are fanciful explanations of how . . the camel got his hump (because he was always saying- Humph to everybody). Modeled on the folktales of tribal peoples, they express humor, morality, or are whimsy in ‘explaining’ how various animals gained their special characteristics.

" ‘Not long ago,’ writes science historian Michael Ghiselin, ‘biological literature was full of ‘Just-So’ stories and pseudo-explanations about structures that had developed ‘for the good of the species.’ Armchair biologists would construct logical, plausible explanations of why a structure benefited a species or how it had been of value in earlier stages."—*R. Milner, Encyclopedia of Evolution (1990), p. 245.

Times have not changed; in fact, things are getting worse. As many scientists are well-aware, *Darwin’s book was full of Just-So explanations; and modern theorists continue in the tradition of ignoring facts and laws as they search for still more implausible theories about where stars, planets, and living organisms came from.

When they are written for little people, they are called fairy stories; but, when prepared for big people, they are called "the frontiers of evolutionary science."

Charles Darwin, always ready to come up with a theory about everything, explains how the "monstrous whale" originated:

"In North America the black bear was seen by Hearne swimming for hours with widely open mouth, thus catching, like a whale, insects in the water. Even in so extreme a case as this, if the supply of insects were constant, and if better adapted competitors did not already exist in the country, I can see no difficulty in a race of bears being rendered, by natural selection, more and more aquatic in their structure and habits, with larger and larger mouths, till a creature was produced as monstrous as a whale."—*Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859 and 1984 editions), p. 184.

"We know that this animal, the tallest of mammals, dwells in the interior of Africa, in places where the soil, almost always arid and without herbage [not true], obliges it to browse on trees and to strain itself continuously to reach them. This habit sustained for long, has had the result in all members of its race that the forelegs have grown longer than the hind legs and that its neck has become so stretched, that the giraffe, without standing on its hind legs, lifts its head to a height of six meters."—*Jean-Baptist de Monet (1744-1829), quoted in Asimov’s Book of Science and Nature Quotations, p. 87.

"So under nature with the nascent giraffe, the individuals which were the highest browsers, and were able during dearths to reach even an inch or two above the others, will often have been preserved . . By this process long-continued . . combined no doubt in a most important manner with the inherited effects of increased use of parts, it seems to me almost certain that any ordinary hoofed quadruped might be converted into a giraffe."—*Charles Darwin, Origin of the Species (1859), p. 202.

"This issue [of how the giraffe got its long neck] came up on one occasion in a pre-med class in the University of Toronto. The lecturer did not lack enthusiasm for his subject and I’m sure the students were duly impressed with this illustration of how the giraffe got its long neck and of the power of natural selection.

"But I asked the lecturer if there was any difference in height between the males and the females. He paused for a minute as the possible significance of the question seemed to sink in. After a while he said, ‘I don’t know. I shall look into it.’ Then he explained to the class that if the difference [in male and female giraffe neck lengths] was substantial, it could put a crimp in the illustration unless the males were uncommonly gentlemanly and stood back to allow the females ‘to survive as well.’

"He never did come back with an answer to my question; but in due course I found it for myself. According to Jones the female giraffe is 24 inches shorter than the male. The observation is confirmed by Cannon. Interestingly, the Reader’s Digest publication, The Living World of Animals, extends the potential difference to 3 feet!

"Yet Life magazine, a while ago, presented the giraffe story as a most convincing example of natural selection at work."—Arthur C. Custance, "Equal Rights Amendment for Giraffes?" in Creation Research Society Quarterly, March 1980, p. 230 [references cited: *F. Wood Jones, Trends of Life (1953), p. 93; *H. Graham Cannon, Evolution of Living Things (1958), p. 139; *Reader’s Digest World of Animals (1970), p. 102].