Dawkins makes much of his believing in something only because it is true and not for any other reason that others sometimes claim for their beliefs, such as that it's comforting and that sort of thing. Well, I believed in Christianity because I believe it is true, that's how I came to it, So I can say I share tht with him. I don't think I gave much if any thought to the promise of eternal life ujtiol I was well into my belief and had to deal with the question of salvation which had also escaped me ot that point. I was enamored of the reality of God, smitten you could say with Goedd, in love with God whom I had come to know is real, really real. I couldn't love a hypothesis or a myth, I had to know He is real and then I was reduced to a kind of swooning if you will at the very thought of this omnipresent omnipotent omniscient Being. Who said what I thought were , are, very lovable things in the Old Testament. Yes tht book that Dawkins hates so much.
So I'm sure Dawkins genuinely believes that evolution is true and has been proved by evidence just as he is convinced that the God of the Bible, or anyh god at all for that matter, is not true, not real but a figent of human imagination. I'm sure he believes it all.
But I can't find this evidence he thinks exists for evolution. I really can't. It seems to me to be nothing but a plausible hypothesis, an idea, a way of imagining how it could work if it were true, but that it has absolutely no real evidence for it. None. He claims it over and over but hasn't succeeded in showing it to me.
Seems to me all the variation in living things is attribuable to what is sometimes called microevolution, the built in variability of each genome. The human geneome contains potential variations in skin colr, hair type and color, eye color, size, height, type of musculature and things like tht so that we all differ from each other and whole populations differnt enormously from other populations. But that is microevolution, variabiles built into the genome. The Theory of Evolution would have human beings change into something that is not human over bazillions of yers and there is abolutly no evidence for that, not even little hints of the possibility in present time. Microevolution can make races and breeds but it hhas an end point beyond which no further change is possible when all the variables in tht given line of "evlution" are played out and the final population is characterized by a great number of fixed or homozygous genes. If it can't change further then that is the end point of evolution, period. There are plenty of other lines of evolutiont ht could still be pursued in any given large poulation, but each of those will eventually meet the same end point. if it's "evolving" then it will reach that point eventually. Of course much of a population may not be changing much t all. The vast herd of wildebeests can probably stay genetically the same for thousands of years. It has to do with the great numbers and the constant intermixing among them. Once yhou have a small group isolated from the main herd it will begin got develop new characteristics over somje number of bgenerations and will eventually produce its own very different look to set it apart from the original population. And a very small number, which is where we see the biggest amonunt of phenotypic change, would rapidly reach the point beyond which no further change is possible. Which is the point that has been reached by the cheetah and the elephant seal and no doubt other endangered species. Selection does not fuel evolution in the Darwininan sense. it fuels, or some kind of sleection which is rally tjust the isolation of a portion of a larger population, fuels microevolution and the devleopment of new populationj characteristics, but microevolution reaches the end point beyond which no further change is possible, at least the treand is always in that direction even if that actual pointis not reached.
The evidence is against Dawkins. What evidence is anuway.
And then there is the fossil record. Al the fossil record is is an imagined sequence, period. Imagined. You can't prove that one fossil is the descendant of a previousait is merely assumed, imagined. but they call it a fact anyway. It seems reasonable to them, plausible, and that's all it tkae sto make it a fact.
So once again I simply poinmt out tht those strata they are found in are flat slabs of sedimentary rock that culdn't possibly ever have been the surface of the earth in some time period. The Jurassic or Devonian or whatnot could not have been characterized by thousands of square miles of sedimentary rock.
Oh well.
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