[IncreasePosts]

No, evolution is not faith based. If you want something faith based, which creationism purports to resolve, it would be if someone has a strong belief on how abiogenesis actually happened, since that is something that is still not well understood. But, we see evolution happening all around us, all the time.

[basil-rash]

It most certainly is. Evolutionists believe in the time invariance of the laws of physics with no proof, creationists believe the processes by why things have changed in the universe (“physics”, broadly) have changed over time, also with no proof. That there is some external influence that we cannot directly observe that has some massive impact on the development of the universe in ways we cannot explain.

(Funnily, physics have come to acknowledge the same, but they call it dark matter and say it’s all very scientific, whatever it is. But this is unknown enough to be not worth much discussion.)

Regarding the evolution we see around us all the time, I and many creationists besides me have full confidence in the idea that micro-evolution does occur. That there is a stochastic gradient decent process that hones in on time-varying local maxima over generations cannot really be denied. But that provides absolutely no answer to the questions of abiogenesis and speciation en-masse.

[dekhn]

The reason we believe in time invariance of the laws of physics is based on observation of old structures in the universe (at least we only have to look back about 4 billion years to the beginning of evolution on earth). So far we have not found any convincing evidence that the laws have changed (either new or different interactions, or the strength of the interactions).

I will say all of science is based on faith- the faith that the human mind can perceive the universe as it truly is, using rational thought and experimental data collection. For some reason this really bothers some scientists and they like to treat science as an unquestionable objective truth, but realistically, we can't exclude any number of hypotheses, but merely state them as improbable based on our understanding.

[basil-rash]

I fear you are failing to comprehend how fundamental the axiom in question (is the universal state influenced by actors beyond our comprehension?) really is. There is no experiment that can answer it, any and all observations must be looked at under a lens that is fundamentally influenced by your answer to the question.

We can certainly say that the observations look like they may have progressed at the rate we expect for the past 13 billion years, but that does nothing to exclude the possibility that around 6,000 years ago some actor we do not understand took 1 week to craft everything we observe now to be precisely how it is.

Reading your final paragraph, I believe we are more aligned than I previously thought. :)

[dekhn]

I thought even creationists rejected the Ussher chronology.

[basil-rash]

Some might. There are many branches and leaves in both the evolutionist and creationist worldview trees. That axiom is simply a fairly significant trunk-branch.

That said, it is very rare that I hear someone describing themselves as Christian who denies the general 7 day creation story. I happen to personally believe it was seven consecutive days^, but I've heard arguments it could have been seven days with an unknown gap in-between each pair.

^ "day" being the most morally-understandable way of describing the intervals at which the creation occurred. Obviously there was no sun or even light at first, so the concept of a day itself is shaky, and I make no claims as to how many cesium-133 transitions may have occurred in that period, or how far light might have travelled in one of them once it was created, or the magnitude of the various fundamental forces' impact on matter in that period, or really anything related to our understanding of how the dynamics we currently observe may have behaved in those intervals.

[dekhn]

I think I'll stick to the Silmarillion, it's a much more compelling origin story than Genesis (either version).