[Will]

Just a comment...

Originally posted by Krsqk:
No, belief isn't a switch, but it is a choice. Either you choose to believe in God, or you choose to believe in evolution.

Ummm, I'm pretty sure you didn't mean to word it like that. I know quite a few people who tell me they believe in some god (most of them the Christian God), and that they believe evolution happens. I know a few people that believe in several gods, not just one. So, as you typed it, that statement is utterly and completely wrong

As for the whole evolution/randomness thing... I have come to believe that the reason so many people cannot accept it is because humans in general have a hard time grasping the concept of how large the universe is, and how long the time is it's actually been in existance. Probably doesn't help that, from what we understand of the mind, subconsiously, we don't recognize anything larger than 4 (I was suprised when I heard about this, but I did some quick testing on myself. If you flash cards with varying numbers of items on it, very quickly, you can tell if there are 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, or more than 4 items on it with accuracy. Pinpointing in the more than 4 catagory is very inaccurate.). So, consiously, the numbers we understand are lots of Groups of 4 added together, and at some point, this breaks down.
Think of one million dollars. "Wow, that's a lot of money." But, if you have one million dollars right in front of you, in one dollar bills, the reaction would be more like "WOW! That's a LOT of money!"

And back to the actual point: it is hard for humans to believe the randomness behind evolution and other theories (BTW, another digression... for scientists, a theory is something that has been continually substantiated by facts, while a hypothesis more acurately describes what "lay" people term a theory. The "Theory of Evolution" is more accurately the "Theory of Microevolution", as this has been substantiated several times. Macroevolution is infered from this, but as it is difficult to prove this within a human lifespan, it would still be classified a hypothesis).
Hmmm... back to the point again... it is hard to believe the randomness behind these theories because in order for that randomness to give the results, it would require the processes going on in a very, very large number of places, over a very, very large amount of time. Since we can't really fundamentally understand numbers greater than 4, we must rely on abstractions to understand what is happening. For religious people, the abstraction is god(s) of some sort(s). For scientific people, the abstraction is a universe that is amazingly, mind-bogglingly huge, we can't even begin to grasp it, and if we actually did, it would probably kill the graspee (read The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, chapter 10... The Total Perspective Vortex). So, just accept that the Universe is "one heck of a big place" and work on that assumption

Hopefully all of that made some sort of sense...