Evolution is a Fact! Depending on what one means by “evolution,” of course it is. There are no living dinosaurs. This leads to the indisputable conclusion that the earth’s biosphere has “evolved” from a place where dinosaurs were common to a place where dinosaurs exist not at all. “Evolution” in this sense is an indisputable fact.
Materialists shamelessly trade on an equivocation between the “fact” of evolution in this sense and the “fact” of a materialist account of evolution. There are no dinosaurs. Therefore, the competence of blind, unguided mechanical forces to transform the biosphere from a place where dinosaurs were common to a place where dinosaurs exist not at all is indisputably established. Notice the linguistic flim flam employed here. The indisputable fact of change is asserted as the same thing as the indisputable fact of a particular means by which the change came about.
Suppose we know that at one time Charlie was in London. We know that Charlie is presently in New York. It is an indisputable fact that Charlie’s location changed from London to New York. Now suppose that someone were to say the fact that Charlie’s location changed from London to New York establishes as an indisputable fact that Charlie took a voyage on the Queen Mary II. It is not hard to see how absurd that assertion is. Yet the two cases are identical in that they both confuse certainty about the fact of a particular change with certainty about how that change came about.
In the case of Charlie’s travels, that absurdity would be compounded if we knew that Charlie was in London only twelve hours ago. It is impossible for the QMII to travel between England and the United States in twelve hours. With this new information, therefore, we have a very good reason to discard “passage by Queen Mary II” as a possible means by which Charlie’s change in location came about.
Again there are parallels with the evolution debate. The Cambrian Explosion occurred in a geological blink of an eye. That is why Darwin himself cited it as a major objection to his theory. Darwin thought that objection would be answered eventually, but it has not. The absurdity of insisting that the indisputable fact of the change in the biosphere is the same thing as the indisputable fact of a particular materialist means by which the change came about is compounded if there are very good reasons to believe that means asserted – Darwinian gradualism – is not up to the task of bringing about the change observed.
The distinction between fact of change and means of change is easy to see in Charlie’s trip to New York. Why is the exact same distinction so hard for many people to grasp when we are talking about evolution?