okay, i've been trying to stay away from this one. evolution vs creation can be a touchy subject.
i feel, though, that i have to respond to this:
You can't prove evolution either. Scientific theories are proven when you can observe the theory taking place. We can't observe evolution taking place, it takes too much time.
this is not actually true. you can watch it happen. one well-used example is a species of moth that changed its dominant color from brown to grey within the span of a single human lifetime, as an adaption to the change in color of their usual hiding spots due to air pollution. there are also fossil records that allow us to study animals of the past. beyond that, we can study plants and animals in remote locations, such as the relatively isolated galapagos islands.
if you want to
really watch evolution in action, though, you go to microscopic level. bacteria have very short life cycles, and entire populations can be observed to adapt to changes in their chemical enviornment within days.
that's actually the reason it's so hard to cure the "common cold." you can't, under ordinary circumstances, get the same cold twice. you develop antibodies to it when you get rid of it, and your body keeps the template for those antibodies for the rest of your life. so, if you encounter the same strain again, you'll just produce those antibodies again and fight it off before you get sick. the thing is that the cold viruses mutate and evolve, changing enough so that the same antibodies won't work. the same is true of the flu. that's why you need a flu shot every year. the shot innoculates you against the 3 most prominent developing strains of each year.
so, basically, there are plenty of ways to observe evolution, and other long-term evidence to support the theory.
i won't get into the term "creation science."
as for the big bang, i'm not well-versed in current physics theory, but i hear it's still under debate. actually, last i heard, the big bang theory had been discarded in favor of one based on the observed phenomenon of spontaneous generation. i never quite got the details of that, but basically, particles have been observed to more or less "pop" into existance (though always with a balancing anti-particle). i'm not explaining it well because, like i said, i never studied the theory myself (i just got a quick explanation from a physics major friend, and that was a few years ago).
we've known for a long time that when particles and anti-particles (the anti-matter equivalent of the particle in question) meet, they basically cancel each other out, instantaneously tranforming from matter to energy (in what's known as a matter-anti-matter explosion). you can calculate the exact amount of energy released using good old e = m * c^2 (energy is equal to the amount of matter involved multiplied by the square of the speed of light). so, as i understand it, spontaneous generation is basically the same process in reverse.
if you let that happen for a few billion years, eventually enough particles would come into existance to start forming the observable universe.
or something like that. hopefully some other folc can explain it better.
the point is that what actually happened is being studied, and that our understanding is being updated as we learn more. old theories can be disproven, new theories put forth. gaps in our knowledge are being filled in.
just think. a few thousand years ago, we had no way to explain lightning, other than claiming it was a fight between gods. we're learning, slowly.
now, that doesn't mean that the universe wasn't created by some higher being, its physical laws and basic constants and such carefully defined, etc etc. that remains a possibility (though how probable a possibility is obviously a matter of debate and personal opinion).
as for literal 7-day creation, i've always wondered about something (and it actually came up in "inherit the wind," the novel/play/movie based on the scopes trial)... if the sun wasn't created until the fourth day, how do you know how long the first 3 days were? isn't it conveivable that those "days" are metaphors for longer periods? or that the whole story is a parable?
Paul
