LLC

1. God is subjective. Through personal experience, one can become convinced of something particular, however this is not a reliable way of determining a truth from a fallacy. However, in order for me to believe that something is objectively true, it needs to be demonstrable, repeatable, and unbiased. 2. I don't. As a physicist, I could speak for the whole community of physicists when I say that if tomorrow, someone disproved the gravity constant with through rigorous study and observation, everyone would change their viewpoint promptly. The same thing happened when it was proven that the earth was round, or that our planet was heliocentric. We can not know that everything true with absolute certainty. The only way we can come close is through scientific study and observation. Hope this answers your question!

The argument of the original poster is not well thought out. So what if Fidel Castro and Hitler were atheists? Did their beliefs guide their actions? No. Out of all my years of studying history, I have not read anywhere of these people committing their actions for the 'Glory of Atheism'. Sure, they were bad people. Bad people who happened to be atheists. In comparison, lets look at the bombers of 9/11. Their beliefs informed and encouraged their actions (although, their beliefs were certainly not mainstream muslim). They bombed the twin towers for the 'Glory of Allah'.

Evolution does not happen intentionally. Lets say you are a monk living in a monastery in the year 1100 A.D. It is your job to copy, and translate a bible written in Latin to English. If you only had to copy the bible once, the chance of you making any mistakes is rather small. What if you were to copy it 10 times? Well, the chances of any mistakes is a little higher; you might have made one or 2 mistakes in a bible. Lets say you had to now copy and and translate 1,000,000,000 bibles over your lifetime. Against your intentions to copy and translate as accurate as possible, it is more than likely that you made numerous errors, no doubt obscuring some of the passages and possibly adding some words that weren't originally there. Mutations happen in genes pretty often. Sometimes, the phenotype produced from mutations is negligible. Other times, these mutations can be detremental, causing the host to die or even be sterile (Cancer, Auto-immune deficiencies, etc.). Other times, these mutations can be beneficial. For example, a person born with more skin pigment in a hot environment will be more likely not to overheat and will have an easier time surviving to pass on his/her genes or pigmentation to future generation. Small changes over vast periods of time become large changes; or, evolution.

It's obvious, as you note, that those of us with a scientific viewpoint think very differently about these issues than folks who interpret the Bible literally. We beak down the world around us into chunks so that we can study it. One can obviously study biology without knowing a great deal of physics and vice versa. In essence, you seem to actually be asking very basic, and profound, questions about cosmology/physics to me. A question such as "why do we find ourselves in a universe where gravity = x, the electromagnetic force = y, and so on" is not answerable at this point in time. It may never be. One can invoke God as an answer, but from a scientific stance, such answers, right or wrong, don't offer anything in the way of explanatory or predictive power. This is patently false as I already submitted when I referenced the definition of a scientific model presented by Dr. Jason Lisle and how the yec one is predictive on another thread. And what exactly is the predictive power of evolution? As Luftwaffle already pointed out, what is the next stage for the peacock? What will happen next? I have already pointed out to you that Meyers recently published a book on prediction made by the ID movement, to which I could add other examples, but I predict that no matter how many times we observe a single celled organism replicate, it will never produce a multi-celluar one. So far I'm right. This charge is two-dimensional and collapses upon scrutiny. It appears that a lot of people posting in this forum are misinformed about evolution, or have an obscured idea of what it actually is. Evolution occurs in slow gradients over billions and billions of years. Essentially, through an aggregate of small changes, simple organisms have the capacity to become more and more complex over time. I will not go over the proof since it is available all over the internet and in museums. It is OK to be Christian and believe in evolution. Evolution and science have no claims on anything spiritual or outside of observation, it is not an enemy of Christianity. Before developing an opinion, the least you can do for yourselves is personally look at the evidence instead of reading biased sources.