When I hear the choice "creation or evolution" I cringe a little because I don't believe that they have to be mutually exclusive, at least not entirely. But they are usually brought up together and opposing one another. The term "evolution" can be very broad, being simply a gradual process in which something changes into a different form. Darwin's "Theory of Evolution" is more specific however and is what I believe you're referring to.

I personally believe that God created the Universe and everything in it. How he did it, I don't know. Could evolution be a part of God's plan? Possibly. Darwinism, however, does not include God, or any other supernatural forces, providing "guidance" in the process of evolution. Because of this, the genetic mutations have to be completely random and with no purpose, either good or bad. The "value" of the mutation is judged by natural selection. If the mutation is good, the organism lives and prospers passing the mutation on to its offspring. If the mutation is bad, the organism dies and that mutation stops there.

This complete randomness and lack of purpose/guidance (or design) is what gets me. It just doesn't make sense to me on a gut level. Statistically, the odds are overwhelmingly against life as we know it on earth. I know the argument "Given the size of the Universe and the number of possible combinations blah blah blah, it was bound to happen someplace in the Universe and it just happened here". But if you take the Earth as a closed system, it just isn't that big and life just hasn't been here long enough to run through enough permutations to get the results we see around us every day. According to Darwinism, evolution is caused by random, incremental, changes that are followed through to the next generation. Darwinism dictates that every incremental step has to be beneficial to the species or it will not survive natural selection. So for example, the first animal that grew wings would have done so over an extremely large number of generations before the wings are even remotely functional, never mind all the other physical changes needed to fly that also happen by pure chance, and just by pure coincidence happened to the same species that grew wings. The odds of having multiple, complimentary mutations that will eventually become something useful are extremely unlikely. Until those wings are functional, what good are they and why would natural selection pick those animals for survival and why would the other non mutated species die off? To put this in perspective, in the entire history of Homo Sapiens, there is no evidence that we have evolved, and the mutations we see in Humans are all too often destructive, i.e. cancer and other disease. So it would take a long time to "evolve" in such a complex way as to grow wings, or even minor changes for that matter. There are many other things in nature that the complexities are astounding. When the Discovery channel has "venom week" I'm hooked. It is simply amazing how these venoms work. How people claim random mutations resulted in venoms that so intricately attack biological systems of the victims on the cellular level is beyond me.

"Irreducible complexity" is a concept that is popular with Creationist these days along with the Intelligent Design Theory. This concept is that some biological systems could not have been attained by a multiple step process due to the necessity of having all elements present at the same time for the system to be beneficial. This concept points to the need to have an "intelligent designer" involved in the development of life. An example of this would be cilia on single celled organisms. In order for the cilia to function, the mechanical elements have to be fully in place AND several specific proteins must also be present. Without any of the elements present, the cilia would not work and its presence would be harmful to the organism. One problem with irreducible complexity is that as science improves, what once looked like it was irreducibly complex, may get a scientific explanation of a step by step development path that would fit within evolution.

One thing though that really annoys me about many pro-evolution folks is their absolute refusal to accept that fact that evolution is an unproven theory. In this society, it is treated as absolute fact. There was a movement in the recent past by some creationists to simply put a disclaimer in biology textbooks saying that evolution was only a theory and not proven. All hell broke loose within the educational community and they fought it tooth and nail and defeated it. So much for the truth. I was watching a program on Discovery the other day similar to "Walking with Dinosaurs" but about the early mammals. With very little data, the show presented these early mammals explaining what they were, what they ate, how they slept, the time of day they hunted, and what they eventually evolved into. There was one large mammal that lived on both land and in the water (looked like an alligator) and they explained virtually step by step how this creature evolved into a whale. There are no intermediate animals in the fossil record, or any other evidence of this but that didn't stop them from their assertions. I guess their logic was "this was a big mammal that lived mostly in the water. Whales are big mammals that live in the water. Evolution is fact so whales must have evolved from this ancient mammal." The imagination of these pseudo-scientists is amazing. There was no words like "it's speculated that" or "one possible explanation is", everything was presented as fact. All those public school kids are out there swallowing this stuff hook, line, and sinker without so much as asking basic questions. Mastermind, I'm glad your not one of those mind numbed robots .