A Straw Man Of Macroevolution

Evolution may not be of enormous philosophical significance in the way that many of its adherents and detractors insist, but misrepresentions of basic macroevolution still need to be rejected by anyone who encounters them.  Straw man fallacies are easy to find, and evolution is not a concept exempt from misunderstandings or ideological slander.  Just as evolution has nothing to do with atheism, much less with the far broader (and demonstrably false) ideology of naturalism, evolution has nothing to do with some of the popular types of change those in the church describe it as.

The concept of macro-evolution does not entail, as some evangelicals might put it, "butterfly to buffalo" transformations.  Even though the adherents of an idea do not necessarily understand the idea itself, there are seemingly few evolutionists, if any at all, who would say there is evidence that one species abruptly produced a separate species without warning or precedent.  Modern conceptions of macroevolution merely involve gradual changes as creatures adapt to different environments.  Fortunately, evolutionists themselves seem to recognize this to some extent.

Variations within a given species can be passed onto offspring, and it is entirely possible in both a logical and scientific sense for a prolonged series of increasing variations to change certain aspects of a whole species over time.  However, this is not the same as claiming that a lizard would give birth to a cat, or vice versa.  Accumulated variations within a similar group of creatures is far from the straw man that evangelicals hold up as the basic form of evolution.

Macroevolution is ultimately unprovable and unfalsifiable, but this is not because of any characteristic of macro-evolution in particular: science is incapable of doing anything more than providing information about immediate sensory perceptions.  Historical matters, which past evolution would at least somewhat reduce down to, and matters of perception-independent truths (truths about logic and metaphysics) are outside the scope of the scientific method.  Thus, no one can prove or disprove the idea of past macroevolution occurring for the same reason no one can prove that various laws of physics were identical in the past to what they are today.

Even if macroevolution is true, of course, there is nothing about logic, core metaphysics, theology as a whole, or ethics that changes!  At most, evolution is just a particular mechanism by which taxonomic groups of biological creatures change with the passage of time; rationalism and theism are still true either way [1].  Evolution is not even an all-encompassing scientific paradigm, but it is rather a particular idea that falls under the category of biology and does not have any ramifications for certain other parts of science.  Evangelical fear of evolution is unsound all around because of the very limited scope of evolution to begin with!