I don't put faith in various and sundry religious concepts, but I do believe the Bible
Do you believe that man was made in God's image as the Bible reports? If so, you have a faith-based religious beliefs.
If you believe the Bible, you have a lot of unsupported beliefs, which is what I called faith-based thinking. It's very simple - if evidence supports your belief, then it is justified. If some or all of that belief is not based in evidence, then there is faith involved, sometimes just a little. I gave the example of supported or justified belief earlier, such as the belief that my car will turn over the next time I try to start it as it has the last 500+ times.
Some would say I have faith in that outcome, but they are using the word faith to mean justified belief, but I've told you that the ambiguity caused by doing that is why I don't use the word faith for justified belief. As long as my belief is commensurate with the quality and quantity of evidence upon which it is based, it is not a faith-based belief.
But take it a little further, and say not that the car will very likely start, but that it will start is a leap of faith, and not only is not supported by evidence, but is contradicted by it, since sometimes car batteries are dead.
Intelligence - the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.
That sounds more like learning, which requires intelligence, but is not the same thing. For me, the essence of intelligence is being able to recognize opportunities and avoid pitfalls by noticing and properly interpreting evidence, a definition that applies to many animals beside man. This is different from intellect, which is the ability to use symbols in thought, speech, and writing (math, language). It's also different from wisdom.
If intelligence is knowing how to get what you want and how to avoid what you would prefer to avoid when different choices produce different outcomes and one can control those outcomes, then wisdom is knowing what to want to achieve a state of happiness. Intelligent people might succeed in accomplishing their goals only to discover that those goals weren't worthy and didn't generate the expected happiness. Maybe you succeeded in marrying the wrong person, or successfully enter a career that you won't like. You achieved your short-term goal because you were intelligent enough to make it happen, but you didn't find happiness, meaning that those choices were not wise.
It's true some have their reasons for believing that common ancestry is certain... perhaps making inferences from DNA Sequencing, but then it's not based on fossils, since they acknowledge that they cannot be sure of any fossils that would confirm the common ancestor of primates, and they do have faith in the assumptions that go with their beliefs.
Nobody has a valid reason to believe that common ancestry is certain, but they are justified in considering it overwhelmingly likely for reasons discussed below.
You don't just want to believe whatever you feel to, do you?
No. And that's impossible. I can't make myself believe anything I find unbelievable.
I want to have only correct beliefs, or as few incorrect beliefs as possible. Incorrect beliefs can't help, but they might hurt. I know of only one way to do that, and it means avoiding faith-based belief. What better way to have a wrong belief than to believe it without supporting evidence?
So you are saying that only science has the answer for everything?
Only skepticism, reason, and evidence can tell us what is true about the world.
But notice that this occurs even when not doing formal science in a laboratory or observatory. We do the same thing that scientists are doing when we look both ways before crossing the street. We are skeptical enough to look before crossing and not just believe that it will safe even if we don't. We collect data - the disposition of vehicles in the area - and draw sound conclusions about when to proceed safely. We can call this informal science.
But yes, whether looking down the street or into a telescope, in both cases we using the same principles to decide what is true about the world and making decision that increase the likelihood of desired outcomes. Other methods just don't work.
It is true that, today, some researchers have a well-thought-through idea of what the LCA looked like and how it behaved. The trouble is that other researchers have equally well-reasoned models that suggest an LCA that looked and behaved in a completely different way. And that puts the research community in a bit of a quandary.
That's normal for science. Scientists try to assemble the list of possible explanations for an observation and construct tests that distinguish between them. There was once two competing hypotheses for the history of the universe, one that it was static and the other that it was expanding. Then the red shift data became known, and one hypothesis was discarded.
Actually, quite a bit is known about what the last common ancestor of Pan and Homo looked like. It would have been arboreal, an ape that brachiated and knuckle-walked, ate leaves and nuts, had about a third of modern man's cranial capacity, relatively longer arms and shorter legs than man, a snout, vegetarian dentition, shorter than man, hairy, and a robust chest, all of which still applies to Pan but not Homo sapiens. If Pan had such an ancestor, then man did as well.
How you think people don't know the difference between a theory and a scientific theory. Cracks me up.
Everybody who says, "It's only a theory" when referring to a scientific theory doesn't know the difference between an untested hypothesis and a scientific theory.
the theory of evolution is not a scientific fact.
The theory of evolution is so robustly evidenced, that it simply can't be overturned except if a certain incredible discovery were made: a deceptive intelligent designer arranged the fossil strata and various nested hierarchies in genetics, biochemistry, taxonomy, etc. to make it look like evolution had occurred naturalistically on earth over geologic time. It's analogous to finding so much evidence against a suspect that only two hypotheses are possible - he's as guilty as the evidence suggests, or he was framed. One cannot use that evidence to support any other conjecture.
Evolution has passed that point. It is now impossible to overturn it unless one finds evidence of this incredibly powerful trickster. One cannot explain the mountains of evidence from multiple scientific fields that presently support the theory any other way than that it is correct or we were "framed (deceived)."
You've probably heard that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence unless the evidence is expected: If A then B, not B, therefore not A. B is the expected evidence supporting A, it's absence ruling out A. If you went to work yesterday (A), your time card would be stamped and your coworkers would have seen you there (B). Even though you claim to have worked yesterday and want to be paid for it, you won't be. The absence of evidence that you seek is not of this kind. It's more like if A, then maybe B, not B, therefore nothing can be concluded about A. If evolution is correct, maybe we'll find and identify the last common of Pan and Homo, we haven't found this yet, therefore what? - nothing can be said about the validity of the theory based on the absence of evidence.
Which brings me to another point. Those arguing against evolution like to point to what is not known as if it were a critique of the theory, rather than focus on what is known, as is being done in this thread. If you saw
@Shadow Wolf 's Simpsons video, we saw just that as missing links were added in the chain from nonhuman ape to human. Even as data was amassing - more and more fossils - all the creationist Orangutan focused on was the gaps and spaces. Looking at what has been found is where the story is, not the gaps.
So even if a falsifying finding is made that overturns the theory, the existing evidence doesn't go away. I just need to be re-interpeted in the light of that finding. As I suggested, unless you can think of another interpretation of that data apart from the theory is correct and we've been deceived, you have to choose one of those. Biblical creationism is already ruled out, unless you want the cast the god of the Bible in the role of trickster, which would mean that this impish deity didn't want us to know he created the kinds. Is that the god of the Bible?
Talk about whoosh.
Here's a problem I found, however, the term 'creationism' can be misleading, referring to the belief. For instance, there are those that take literally each day of creation to be 24 hours long. But the science itself testifies that would be contradictory to the real facts of geology.
