If you should find yourself in the rather unfortunate position of being confronted by an ignorant, irrational creationist, please remember that evidence and facts mean absolutely nothing to them.

Evidence is just a collection of lies, propaganda and misinformation.

It won’t take long before they will bring up the marvellous point, with smug confidence in their brilliant intellect, that evolution is just a theory; a nice story that supposedly educated individuals tell themselves to help them sleep at night.

Never mind the fact that what “Darwin did for biology is on par with what Newton did for physics”

I will admit that the science which goes to prove evolution and the peer-reviewed articles that support it can be difficult to understand (the intricacies certainly go over my head), but that is not your problem. The science is there for anyone to review and, more importantly, the scientific community and most of the secular world is forced to accept, as fact, that which has been consistently and overwhelmingly proven.

As the great Richard Dawkins points out on page 19 of ‘The God Delusion’, “the fundamentalist [creationist] proclaims that all the evidence in the universe would not change his mind. The true scientist, however passionately he may ‘believe’ in evolution knows exactly what it would take to change his mind: Evidence. And what evidence might contradict evolution? ‘Fossil rabbits in the Precambrian’... if all the evidence in the universe turned in favour of creationism, I would be the first to admit it and I would immediately change my mind. As things stand, however, all available evidence (and there is a vast amount of it) favours evolution. It is for this reason and this reason alone that I argue for evolution with a passion that matches the passion of those that argue against it. My passion is based on evidence. Theirs, flying in the face of evidence as it does, is truly fundamentalist.”

So don’t turn to the evidence; I propose a different strategy... explain why the science logically needs to just be accepted as fact, even if we don’t exactly understand the intricacies that go into it.

Just like we put our lives in the hands of qualified medical professionals whenever we go under the knife, so should we trust in our scientists to present an accurate picture of our reality through the methods at their disposal.

We are absolutely at the mercy of the surgeon’s knowledge of our condition and trust that he or she will be able to use that knowledge to, sometimes literally, save our lives. Even though we are oblivious to the intricacies of the procedure being undertaken.

Should things go wrong, there are institutions set up to hold those accountable for their negligence or criminal conduct.

There is no getting away from it, the scientific community holds the professionals that represent it against the highest standard.

When a scientist embarks on an expedition of discovery, he first presents us with a hypothesis (which, ironically, actually is a theory (in the colloquial sense of the word)).

A hypothesis is an idea that seems to account for a situation or a specific aspect of the natural world.

Then, this hypothesis is required to stand up against, and survive, extensive scrutiny as the scientific community actively attempts to prove the hypothesis false.

This is an oversimplification, but it’s interesting to note that an idea in science is actually attacked at the beginning. They don’t start with something and work towards proving it true; they take a presented idea and actively try to discredit it.

Only once a hypothesis has survived countless attempts to show how it is wrong and the evidence collected in support of its conclusion is too extensive to dispute any longer... only then does it become a theory.

You see, a theory in science has a completely different meaning to how we use the word in everyday language. In fact, the word in the dictionary is first given its scientific description.

A scientific theory is an explanation of an aspect of the natural world that can be repeatedly tested and verified in accordance with the scientific method, using accepted protocols of observation, measurement, and evaluation of results. It is a carefully thought-out explanation for observations of the natural world that has been constructed using the scientific method, and which brings together many facts and hypotheses.

Think of theory as the written explanation of something done in practice.

When I was studying law, I wasn’t practicing it (mostly), I was studying the theory of law. Which is simply stating that I was learning and discovering how the law worked in practice. Legal theory is not just something a legal scholar threw together one night regarding his thoughts and opinions on a legal subject. Yes, it includes one’s critical analysis of the legal problems facing certain matters, but is mostly made up of accepted principles, facts, law, statute, precedent etc.

A scientific theory is the best explanation we have on certain aspects of the natural world and includes evidence, laws and facts to support it.

That is not to say it is immune from being disproven, but until something comes along to knock it from its exalted perch, a scientific theory must, practically, reasonably and rationally be treated as empirical fact. To deny a scientific theory is akin to denying one’s very existence.

Sure, it is possible that you are merely a brain in a vat or that your experience of reality is an illusion and reality itself is an illusion, thus. Yet, this is extremely impractical and it is in our best interest to live as though reality, and our experience of it, is actually real.

So yes, evolution is just a theory... a scientific theory. Which is more than any creationist (with the best of their pseudoscientific crap culminating in Intelligent Design Theory… which actually is a theory in the colloquial sense of the word) could ever wish or hope or pray to say of their so-called god; a being so far removed from reality that, even if it did exist, we are rationally justified to live our lives as though it did not.

Footnotes