• Question: Wasn't there a time when the brightest minds in the world believed that the world was flat? And, up until like what, 50 years ago, you all thought the atom was the smallest thing, until you split it open, So is there a teeny possibility that scientists are wrong about evolution? Do you believe in it?

    Asked by fi97 to Jo, Mark, timcraggs on 24 Jun 2010 in Categories: .
    • Photo: Joanna Buckley

      Joanna Buckley answered on 24 Jun 2010:


      Yeah, that’s right, fi97 🙂

      You very rarely see the curvature of the earth and after the horizon, people thought you’d just plop off the edge! So they traveled to the edge to see what was there and when they didn’t fall off and safely sailed back round to their starting point they said the world was round.

      I don’t believe we can be wrong about evolution because it’s not just one thing which leads us to believe it. There is infinite experimental data which proves evolution happened. The fossil records cannot be faked, for example. They show early creatures and how they modified to adapt to their surroundings over periods of millions of years into the creature we know today. I love fossils, I’ve got quite a few dotted about the house.

      There’s also things about us which proved we came from something else.

      We have a tail bone, also called our coccyx. It serves no real purpose in us but it would have done to our ancestors who had tails. We didn’t need tails and so eventually they were phased out. We’ve just ended up keeping the bone… maybe in thousands of years we’ll be born without one. 🙂

    • Photo: Tim Craggs

      Tim Craggs answered on 24 Jun 2010:


      Hi Fi97,

      There was a time when people thought the world was flat. There was a time when people thought that the sun went around the earth.

      Evolution is a theory, like other scientific theories, it has been tested for many years and found to be consistent with what we observe in experiments and in nature.

      For me, it does not conflict with a creator God. God created us, and in his infinite wisdom he did this by a process of evolution. The accounts of the creation in Genesis and also in Job, are not inconsistent with this view, it depends how literally you take them. For example Genesis contains two separate and slightly different accounts of the creation, which are themselves difficult to align if you take them both literally.

      So I do not believe in evolution, I think it is the best model we have that explains all the available data. But this does not stop me from believing in a creator God. After all what caused the Big Bang?

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