Evolution a Fact?

The other day, I decided to check out a book from the library entitled, “The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution” by Richard Dawkins, published in 2009 by Free Press, a division of Simon & Schuster. I didn’t borrow the book because of any great confidence in the theory of evolution, but rather to be more informed about the subject—a subject that I have been increasingly questioning.

In the book’s first chapter, the author strongly emphasizes his belief: “Evolution is a fact. Beyond reasonable doubt, beyond serious doubt, beyond sane, informed, intelligent doubt, beyond doubt evolution is a fact.” It’s as if he’s pounding his fist and yelling, “It’s true!” assuming this will make it so. He continues saying, “The evidence for evolution is at least as strong as the evidence for the Holocaust, even allowing for eye witnesses to the Holocaust.” {p. 8}

This last sentence is quite revealing of the strength of the authors belief, despite the senselessness of the statement. Can the evidence of evolution really stand up to the evidence of the Holocaust? Historians were there. Survivors exist—we have their reports. We know there was a war and Hitler and the Holocaust were major parts of it. The time period was less than a hundred years ago. Our ability to verify the events of the Holocaust by far outweighs any perceived idea that we can verify the certainty of the process known as evolution and what its full effects and limitations might be.

It seems quite arrogant and conceited for us humans, who are just barely getting a grasp on how life functions and have only created life from other life, to proclaim how life was created and how it progressed over the past 4.5 billion years. We have yet to even show a feasible method to create living things from basic materials. We have not done it ourselves, but claim that we know how life began and how it produced human beings. It’s premature and irresponsible to claim that evolution is “a fact” when we lack so much information. It is still only a theory. And it’s a theory exactly because the scientific community has accepted it as a feasible process that seems to explain many mysteries of life. But it wouldn’t be the first theory that was widely accepted by the scientific community, only to be replaced later by another.

As an example, a backyard mechanic knows a lot about how a car engine operates. He can even modify it to suit his purposes. But he would hardly be a reliable source of information about how the components of the engine were produced to assemble the engine. Perhaps he might have a few “theories” on how they were produced at the factory, but having never stepped foot in such a factory, his theories may well be like trying to hit the bull’s eye on a target after being blindfolded and spun around.

Scientists are in a similar position: they know a lot about how living things function and can do wondrous things by manipulating DNA and such. But only having the broken and aged remnants of the creation of life, they are in no position to declare with any certainty the actual process through which life started and progressed on this planet. Life produced by evolution is a theory that is working for them, but not something we can declare as a fact.