No offence Lizzrd, but I don't see how that has any relevance to anything that was just said.

Oh yay, a debate where one side takes a song in a religious text from ages ago as literal, unsimplified fact.
If we were to have an evolution debate, we'd need someone arguing against evolution first.

Personally, I believe in evolution. I can't think of any direct evidence for it, but there are mountains of indirect evidence.

In my view, the alien conspiracy theory is plausible. A documentary I watched made the point that if aliens had made contact, people would have had difficulty explaining how they flew. The best way to explain it would be to give the "angels" wings. Stories of gods wrath, where people are struck by lightning, or cities are destroyed, would also match advanced alien weaponry.

'Traditional' representations of angels are, surprise, surprise, non-biblical. The halo and the wings are basically a Roman invention, if I remember correctly. Biblical angels are... interestingly shaped.

If you consider natural selection a part of evolution (instead of saying they are separate like most creationists) then there is plenty of evidence of the main device of evolution: survival of the fittest. There's tons of examples of creatures with good traits surviving (in known history) while the rest die out; to think of one common example, the black and white moths in industrial England.

I think evolution is a very interesting part of the original topic (i.e. the hypocrisy of the USA), because they lead the Christian world in disbelief in evolution. Though that statistic has been rising lately, the United States is still way ahead of everyone.

The reason this is a little hypocritical is because the people who don't believe in evolution, the fundamentalists, say they interpret everything literally but in reality they pick and choose what to believe. For example, none of them quote the parts about slavery in the old testament, and very few refer to all the references to stoning in Deuteronomy. Also no one (save Christine O'Donnell) seems to talk about witchcraft, which is also discussed in the bible... I know the Old Testament contradicts the New in quite a few ways, but not everywhere. In some ways, they've adapted to modern life, but in others they hold stubbornly on to the past.

What makes them interpret one thing literally and the rest figuratively, even when the beliefs they choose to cling on to (namely, Genesis) are refuted by the vast majority of everything science has ever found? For an educated, industrialized nation, I sometimes wonder about Americans...

It really annoys me when people imply that evolution ever had man descendent from monkeys as part of the theory.
Taking absolutely everything literally is sort of silly when there is strong evidence parts are poems, other parts that are explicitly stated to be poems with good morals and other parts that are explicitly stated to be poems that are intentionally incredibly cryptic and senseless without interpretation.

Calling the common ancestor an ape is fairly incorrect and mainly serves to give ammunition to people arguing against it.

Ape is still wrong, our common ancestor wouldn't look much like the apes we have today.
That's like me calling you your cousin except you probably look more like your cousin than an ape does to what we both evolved from.

If we're going to debate over vocabulary, then we might as well call them simians.

Let's not argue semantics, ape is the most recognizable, and closest to accurate without getting snobby. Deal wit it.
Edit: Goddamn it, Nonseq said what I said.

The problem is that it is fairly misleading and is in a topic that is already quite poorly understood by most people.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hominidae

Not only are we descended from apes; we are apes. The modern great apes are different from the ones we evolved from, but that doesn't change taxonomy.

From what I understand, in the beginning (up until the 1950s?), evolutionists used the link between men and hominids as evidence for the theory of evolution. However, their archaeological "proof," was often a failure. They attempted to strike against the very heart of people's beliefs, yet the evidence they used at that time was proven wrong. This gives further ammunition to the creationists/fundamentalists.


This is the problem with deeply religious people - they take the bible far too literally. The bible is not adapted to modern discoveries.

The bible doesn't need to be "adapted" to modern discoveries, people just need to realize that a lot of what's in there is meant to be taken as metaphors.