- Joined
- Jul 19, 2012
- Messages
- 14,185
- Reaction score
- 8,768
- Location
- Houston
- Gender
- Male
- Political Leaning
- Libertarian
Those who indulge in creationist claptrap love to use these terms, but he only real difference between the two lies in terms of the amount of time involved. They describe the same process.
Evolution is theory, not fact. It will always be theory because we can't go back and recreate the experiment that resulted in the origination of the species.
This is not to dismiss the theory of evolution, which is a very powerful and very well accepted theory that provides predictive and explanatory power with which to organize much data in biology and paleontology. Nevertheless, there are some pretty profound gaps in the fossile record, in some cases spanning hundreds of millions of years. It's unlikely we are ever going to get a full picture of what happened other than to freely speculate about it. However, there is enough of a record to be able to regard the theory of evolution as reliable and reasonable.
To say that evolution is theory does not provide enough wiggle room for people to regard the Biblical story of creation as literally true. The Biblical story must be understood in other terms.
People who insist that evolution is fact and demand that others see it that way are ignorant of the science and apparently don't understand the terms "theory" and "fact".