If the "viable alternative theory" is either some form of creationism or ID, then you are mistaken about my level of knowledge on those "theories". If there is a different theory I have not yet heard of, I'd love a link to an article or video about it.backwoodsman wrote:You say there's no viable alternative theory, but there is in fact a viable alternative theory. You just don't know anything about it, because you've neglected to educate yourself about it
I was raised in a loosely Old-Earth-Creationist home (the LDS church is sort of a fence-sitter on the topic of Evolution) and took great interest in Creationism of all kinds growing up. I've read the work of Jonathan Wells (icons of evolution is on my desk right now), ID advocate Michael Behe (he and I have emailed a bit back and forth when I was getting permission to use some of his work in video on the evo of genetic information), watched most of Kent Hovand's videos, and I first met Steve Gregg at a talk he did on creation. In my studies I was always eager for someone to tell me something good but instead I was always disappointed. Not once have I seen any of them present an actual competitive alternative to the theory of Evolution. Instead they simply proclaim, without good evidence or sound reasoning, that evolution is not powerful enough to do what biologists claim it can do. They often construct straw-men arguments such as the one presented by paidion above. Some of them even claim that scientists are involved in a giant conspiracy.
Again, here is the challenge I present to those who hate evolution:
Simply give the world a better theory!
People will be resistant to change at first but that resistance will quickly die out when they see that your new theory consistently leads us to more discoveries than the current theory can. This is how science works!
The scientific community has rejected creationist and ID theories because, compared to evolution, they are extremely poor at explaining what we actually see in biology, and because they are extremely slow to lead us to new discoveries. Evolution replaced creationism for the same reason germ theory replaced miasma theory.