Hey Susan,
I imagine you enjoyed the hectic change of pace you just lived through. It's nice to have my email buddy back, though.
Well, back to evolution. I suggested to Jon that y'all should have a conversation about the topic since he is so knowledgable. His response was: what's the point? He thinks there is absolutely nothing that could convince you that you are wrong. He says that you are entirely too happy to come up with science that matches your theories rather than looking at evidence and coming up with theories based on that.
I must say that I'm prone to believe him. I hold out some wild hope, though, that he's wrong. This is the definition of madness or delusion, though. Why should I be the one person who is able to convince a devout young-earth creationist that they are completely and wildly wrong? It's like our damn cat. Everyone thinks they're going to be the one person Meechi doesn't bite, inspite of all the warnings otherwise. And then they get bitten. Sometimes twice!
But I think that it's not me that's the special case here but you. You are intelligent, yes, but thats not all. You seem to believe in science. You want to fight evolutionists on their own terms, using science. You never resort to appeals to a god's magic. I therefore think that you must be building an extreme form of cognitive dissonance in your mind. This cognitive dissonance surely will lead to a coming-to-god moment where you see your own ideas contradict each other. I believe that happened with our conversation on entropy, and I believe it will happen again.
You mentioned "proof" in your last email. I think you hold in too high esteem the idea of proof. There is no way to prove undeniably, irrevocably anything outside of mathematics. If you are claiming that no one can prove mathematically that evolution occurred, then you are right. You can, though, prove with a mountain of evidence to the fullest extent that anything can be proved scientifically that evolution did in fact occur. With equal rigor but much less effort can one prove that the earth is certainly not, not, not 10,000 years old.
All of this is talking AROUND the issue, though. Why don't you tell me what you think are the flimsiest parts of your own argument, and then argue against them as if you were me. Then at least I would know if and where the cognitive dissonance lies. At least then I'd know there's a reason to keep on writing you about this, other than for odd entertainment value.
There are very simple clear things we can focus on, and yet we waste so many words on stuff that gets us nowhere.
One thing that will never convince me of anything and shouldn't convince you either is this idea that you bring up over and over: you'll bring up a scientific tool (like carbon dating, or any other atomic clock, or fossil strata), and then you'll say that there has been at least one instance where this tool gave an incorrect result (such as scientists having gotten a date wrong or one instance where the strata were upside down). Just because something fails once doesn't mean that it doesn't work. I've seen broken wristwatches, but I still believe in the forward motion of time! Yes, these instances are interesting, but they shouldn't cause you to completely disregard the science behind the tools! Do you agree?
If you agree let's go back to fossil strata. I'm reading a book right now that's pretty awesome that's called The Evolution of Plants. It's actually more of a text book, actually. You'd probably go gaga for all the footnotes. I'm reading the chapter about the evolution of trees, and it's pretty exciting stuff. One of the claims of the book is that the lower or more ancient strata contain fossils of much simpler plants (and no complex plants!) and the higher or more recent strata contain much more complicated fossilized structures in plants. The book is then able to date the evolution of the first trees to about 365 million years ago. It seems to me that you have two choices: 1) you don't believe the evidence that the book claims, that is you don't believe that there is strata of dirt across the globe where the lower layers have simpler plants (of course you could check it yourself), or 2) you agree that this is powerful evidence of evolution of plants!
Do you agree? Or do you have some third thing I haven't thought of?
By the way, I just read about the evolution of the leaf, and it was pretty exciting! It seems about 400mya it was too hot for it to be reasonable to have a broad flat leaf because it would presumably burn up, but then the atmosphere and climate dramatically changed, it got cooler and co2 levels got higher, so the needly plants developed webbing between the "needles" and the needles became the vasculature of the leaves! Very exciting! You'd probably have to read the book to get a real feel for it. It's got very good pictures, too. I got the book from interlibrary loan, btw.
-Brandon
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