Here’s an interesting article, from this week’s Patheos Catholic newsletter:
Signatories of the Scientific Dissent From Darwinism must either hold a Ph.D. in a scientific field such as biology, chemistry, mathematics, engineering, computer science, or one of the other natural sciences; or they must hold an M.D. and serve as a professor of medicine. Signatories must also agree with the following statement:
“We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged.”
“In our experience, expressing dissent from Darwinism can generate controversy and be unsafe, especially for those who haven’t earned tenure. If you have not received tenure, you may want to consider carefully whether you should sign.”
Current list of signatories:
FWIW, my perception is that even evangelical profs of biology, geology and the relevant sciences who sign declarations of an inerrant Bible, with few exceptions, are convinced that God used evolutionary mechanisms to develop the complexity of life. Of course, this could be because they’re all indoctrinated. My own impression in reading the data, is that their consensus results from being exposed to the evidence, and how powerful the explanatory ability of natural selection actually is.
Modern people have been so indoctrinated by evolutionary theory (and it is theory) that the majority of them believe it to be factual. The so-called evidence consists of observations that have been explained by evolutionary theory. Then having explained these observations, evolutionists then present those observations as evidence of the theory.
Creationists do the same. There is intelligent life on earth. They explain this by stating that God created it. Then they say that intelligent life on earth is evidence that God created it.
I don’t understand your complaint. Consider this example, part of an actual laboratory experiment.
Flour beetles were cultured in the laboratory in containers of wheat flour. The eggs, larvae, pupae, and adults of these beetles were periodically removed by sifting. Using this method of collecting eggs, the researcher started new cultures with eggs from old cultures. By regular sifting, the earliest appearance of eggs could be documented. When these earliest eggs in each generation were repeatedly used to initiate new cultures, eggs in subsequent new cultures eventually showed up earlier and earlier compared to when they showed up in control cultures initiated without restriction on when starter eggs were laid.
Thus, initiating cultures with the earliest eggs laid led to a genetic change over time in when eggs were first laid, i.e., first reproduction in the beetles evolved to an earlier age as a result of selection.
How does this study demonstrate the circularity you mentioned?
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Your allusion is a common criticism of evolution: "there is evidence for microevolution but not macroevolution." But that criticism is wrong. Microevolution (evolution within a species) can lead and often has led to macroevolution (evolution at or above the species level). The key process that links microevolution to macroevolution is speciation or the process by which new species are formed. Hereis a clear discussion of evidence for speciation, and thus macroevolution, occurring before our very eyes. This site linked to is a useful one, and a Christian one at that.
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I read your complaint to be that the scientific method makes observations of the physical data, and then argues that the hypothesized scientific mechanism (here, evolutionary change) is the theory that explains the observed physical developments. (A parallel might be observing how objects fall… and proposing it fits the hypothesis that a force like gravity is at work, vs. saying ‘God does it’ explains it.)
Rejecting that approach would appear to be rejecting how science works on any hypothesis. And the thesis that “God created it” is not necessarily a mutually exclusive alternative, since all the evolutionary evangelical inerrantists I cited would also insist that God created everything.
But ‘God does it’ is not a competing explanation of the physical mechanisms involved in the development of creatures. As I see it, theology can propose the purpose, meaning and even the ultimate cause behind physical events. But only science can investigate how they materially develop.
Or to put it another way. Theology explains the “why”. Philosophy and science explains the “how”…
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Secrets from the World’s Best-Preserved Nodosaur
By Brian Thomas, PH.D.
Nodosaurs were tank-like dinosaurs…Miner Sawn Funk encountered one during 2011 in Alberta’s Millennium Mine.
…
Dinosaur-coloration expert Jakob Vinther, looking at the nodosaur’s skin pigments, told National Geographic that it is so well preserved that it “might have been walking around A COUPLE OF WEEKS AGO. I’ve never seen anything like this.” [My emphasis]
First, I affirm that I don’t have a complaint. I am not complaining; I’m explaining.
Consider this analogous example:
Joe: I notice that almost all blossoms of radish plants are white. Yet a few of them are purple—a nicer colour. I wonder why.
Jim: I can explain that. There are billions of little imps who also believe purple blossoms are prettier. So they take out their tiny paint brushes and paint as many of them purple as they can.
Joe: Well… that’s a unique theory! Do you have any evidence of it?
Jim: The evidence is the very fact that some of the blossoms are purple!
Now read what I said about evolutionary theory. I think you’ll understand it now.
No, I still do not understand your point. The imp explanation is not at all analogous to what a geneticist does in uncovering the evolution of earlier reproduction in flour beetles or the genetic cause of flower color in radish. The imp explanation is a non-falsifiable hypothesis, and as such, it is not a scientific one. Evolution, on the other hand, can be tested and its predictions can be logically proved false by those tests, as in all scientific hypotheses. If the predictions are not proved false, then they can be logically retained, at least tentatively (although retaining them does not necessarily mean they are true).
From
Is Evolution a Theory or a Fact?
It is both. But that answer requires looking more deeply at the meanings of the words “theory” and “fact.”
The article then talks, about the meaning of both words.
Or look at this WIki article:
Or this BBC article:
Things to ponder and think about!
Now these two words, are REALLY scary! 
Through selection, animals, birds, insects, and plants, particular population proportions can emerge, which were inherent in their ancestors.
Here is a very simple example of selection in which I, myself was involved. After planting a large crop of radishes in the garden one year, I noticed that although nearly all the blossoms were white, there was a few plants that produced purple blossoms. I saved the seeds from the purple-blossomed plants and planted them the following year. Much to my surprise, nearly all the plants in the second year had purple blossoms. I had expected an increase in the proportion of plants with purple blossoms in that second year, but not nearly that great.
The radishes hadn’t “evolved” into a type that produced purple blossoms. The radishes I planted in the first year had the genetics to produce mostly white blossoms but some purple ones. It’s just that through selection the proportion of plants that bore purple blossoms increased. That’s not evolution.
Evolution is a change in allele frequency over time in a population. (An allele is simply an alternate form of a gene, for example a recessive allele b that when present in two copies produces blue eyes and a dominant allele B that when present in one OR two copies produces brown eyes in humans.) Your selection experiment in which you planted the seeds of only radishes with purple flowers changed locally the allele frequency over time in a radish population. Thus, your experiment did result in evolution at a very local level.
Similarly, the use of antibiotics is a kind of selection experiment that results in changes in allele frequencies within bacteria targeted by the antibiotics, with an increase in the frequency of alleles that confer bacterial resistance to the antibiotic. That is evolution, too. Similar selection experiments have produced the many breeds of domestic animals such as dogs, pigeons, and cattle, for example, with corresponding changes in allele frequencies in these species populations over time.
Natural selection does the same thing, but usually over longer periods of time because the intensity of natural selection is seldom as high and consistent as it is in artificial selection.
But all selection, whether it is artificial or natural, can change allele frequency over time in a population and so it can result in evolution, by definition.
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To me, Darwinian macroevolution (i.e., the changing of one Biblical kind into another kind/ all living things descended from the same primordial unicellular organism, which was spontaneously enlivened from inanimate material) and anthropogenic climate change are on parallel tracks:
Rush Limbaugh explains why libs terrified of climate change
Excerpts:
Liberals are terrified of climate change because they don’t believe in God, contends talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh.
The left, he said, believes the "earth, the universe, the solar system, the planets, whatever … [is] some random, haphazard, accidental thing that’s just really, really fragile."
"Well, then, you can be easily coerced into believing that one or two slight changes could destroy it, if it’s just an accident, if it’s just a coincidence," he reasoned.
"It’s just, like, some Big Bang. I mean, if it’s really fragile… You notice one of the foundational aspects of selling climate change is that the earth is fragile, that the ecosystem and the climate are fragile, barely being held in place.
“One wrong move and we could all be gone! But people who have been raised with a… I’m not talking about devout. The people that have been raised with a belief in, respect for, and understanding of God and creation are gonna be much harder sells on this.”
…Limbaugh explained his personal view: "See, for me, folks, it is impossible to believe that all of this majesty and everything that we have learned about the universe and all that is. … It’s impossible for me to believe that this just happened.
If that’s what you mean by “evolution” then I believe in it. But my understanding of “evolution” is that which comes about by natural mutation.In that, I do not believe.
But mutations can change allele frequency over time, too, as shown by the Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium. So, mutations alone can also lead to evolution. But such evolution, like that caused by genetic drift, is not usually adaptive (so it is likely not to persist). Only evolution caused by natural selection is normally adaptive, and so will usually be a long-term change in allele frequency over time in a population.
The usual factors that lead to adaptive evolution in a population are mutations, which produce genetically based variations in organisms’ phenotypes, followed by natural selection, which interacts differentially with those phenotypic variations, leading to some variations reproducing more than others. In this way, alleles more compatible with the kind of natural selection present increase in frequency over time in that population.