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Fearless,

Been kinda busy lately, so won't have time for a complete response, although by all accounts you and Cobra are tying up the internet with your posts to each other anyway. LOL

(Evolution) isn't possible because "we" (the church or believers) DEEM it impossible.

Precisely. This is the sort of thinking that was used by ancient Greeks (e.g. Aristotle, Pythagorean Paradigm). How SHOULD the universe be (because I believe it to be), not how IS the universe. At the time of the ancient Greeks, the field of science was relatively new, so we can excuse their hubris to some degree. Nowadays, especially with the amount of information easily available everyone, there really is no excuse for people being ignorant about the facts.

Of course, as an engineer that does believe in God, I find it hard to believe in a God that tries to "trick" us with solid evidence in order to "test" our belief.

Exactly. Which is why I use a similar statement in discussions with people about evolution. For example, we will soon have the capability (assumig there isn't another NASA disaster) to measure parallax to stars that are far more than 6000 light years away. Parallax is an unambigous, non-interperative way to measure the distances to objects (i.e. one cannot argue that there is some underlying assumption that could be wrong). So if we measure the distance to a star to be say 50,000 light years away, it means that light had to have been travelling for 50,000 years through space to reach us. At this point, anti-evolutionists will often jump in and say "what if the speed of light isn't constant" at which point I can clearly demonstrate how that would lead to VAST inconsistencies (which I won't bore you with unless you want to know) in many areas of science, and very few people are willing to support their beliefs if they have to accept such inconsistences (other than the ALL SCIENCE IS WRONG crowd). Those folks are left with a dilemma, how can the Earth be 6000 years old if light has been moving for 50,000 years. Either the Earth was created long afterwards (which violates their literal 6-day creation) or their literal interpretation is wrong. Most will usually jump in at that point and say "well God could have created the light EN ROUTE to the earth." At which point I bring up the "God tricking us" statement, which usually devolves into "God can do whatever he wants" type statements, at which the convo is over.

Are there people out there that insist the world is flat and that the earth is the center of the universe?

Yes. There is the Flat Earth Society and DOTGU (Defenders of the Geocentric Universe) to name a couple. These groups are associated with fundamentalist Christian churches. There was actually another crowd that insists that the Earth is motionless, another one of the tenants of old geocentrism. This crowd however recently convinced a state senator that their POV was Biblical, and he tried to enter a statement supporting the group into a legislative meeting. He was called on it and retracted fortunately.

My guess is that 200-500 years from now evolution will be treated just as blasely by the church.

I certainly hope so. In EVERY other country in the world that isn't ruled by religious groups, evolution is acceptable. They even did some surveys of people in various parts of the world and most had no idea there was even a controversy about evolution.

They will fight and fight until scientists have come to a better more clear understanding of evolution (because they are still learning, right?)

Of course we are still learning, we always will. But let me make one point crystal clear. While there is no such thing as absolute proof in science, there can always be new data in the future that could invalidate your model, it is EXTREMELY unlikely that will ever happen for evolution. There is so much data supporting it, from every conceivable angle, that it would really take some impressive data to overturn it. Basically it would mean that a LOT of people working very hard with very good instruments for a long time were wrong every time. I know people say "well what about the Earth-centered universe, people were wrong about that weren't they?" What they don't understand is that there was no consistent model or view of science at that time, there were hardly any instruments capable of making accurate measurements of anything, and there was very little questioning allowed. None of those conditions exist today. We have a consistent view of the scientific method, we have instruments capable of measuring from microscopic to bigger than the Earth, and scientist CONSTANTLY question the status quo.

I will often hear people bring up Newton and Einstein and Gravity at this point, but that is still apples and oranges. Newton's Law of Gravity being "wrong" and being eventually replaced by Einstein's relativity was a matter of measurement precision. Saying evolution could be proven wrong in a similar way would be equivalent to saying Einstein could have proven Gravity didn't exist. He did nothing of the sort, he simply realized that in certain situations, Newton's Laws were inaccurate. He then came up with a model that explained not only the situations Newton's Laws explained, but also these new situations that Newton had no ability to measure with his more primitive instruments. To make a long story short, someone in the future may come up with an overarching theory that encompasses evolution, but it is highly doubtful that the idea of evolution will ever be discarded.

and at that point the church will acquiesce and move on because it all reality evolution doesn't threaten God any more that the Earth's place in the solar system or universe threatens God.

That is true. Evolution doesn't threaten God, and neither did heliocentrism or a spherical Earth. However, it DOES threaten the absolute mental control that some church leaders exercise over their "flock." THAT is the root problem.

Of course we could go on and on with microevolution versus macroevolution, 2nd Law of thermodynamics, etc. etc. ... if you are so inclined.

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