Would presenting less evidence for evolution convince more people?
DanielStraight: I don't think anti-creationism evangelists are fighting the right battle. blahedo basically nailed it in this post: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=892757I would say it like this: creation is a non-scientific issue. It is not, absolutely NOT anti-scientific. Science is to creation as anthropology is to dependency injection. There just isn't any relation.Allow me to illustrate. If you were God (more specifically, if you had the power to create something from nothing) and you wanted to prepare an awesome dinner for your significant other, what would you do? Would you create a huge cosmic explosion, wait for planets to form, set up the necessary amino acids for life on one of them, wait for life to form, direct the evolution of plants suitable for human consumption, start a garden to grow those plants, grow some produce, harvest it and cook it up? No, you would just snap your fingers and create the dinner. After doing so, any scientist looking at your dinner would conclude that something like the process I described above had occured. There would be absolutely no way for them to know it had been created from nothing as all scientific inquiry would point to a clear natural origin. The ingredients in the dinner would all be identifiable as known plants and animals, so the obvious conclusion would be that they came from those known plants and animals. That the ingredients just popped out of nowhere as you snapped your fingers is not a provable (or disprovable) explanation. It is therefore non-scientific.It is quite possible that God created the world 2 seconds ago and everything we think we know about history was just pre-embedded in our minds. The situation would be almost exactly analogous to the dinner example I gave above, and science would still conclude the same things about our past. There would be absolutely no way whatsoever to prove or disprove our divine origins.The situation is exactly the same regardless when God is alleged to have created the universe. Maybe God created the universe 100 years ago, maybe 1000, maybe 10000, maybe there is no God. The point is, these are not questions science can answer and they are not questions any scientist should ever try to answer.In summary, evolution is as far as we know scientific fact. It certainly could be disproven (otherwise it wouldn't be science), but for now, it is irrefutable fact. It is simultaneously possible that the entire universe was created 2 seconds ago. The universe could have been created with this post already written and me only thinking I had written it myself. If that were the case, evolution would still be an irrefutable fact. It would be wrong, but it would be scientific truth. Science can only answer scientific questions (and can only answer them with scientific answers). It cannot and should not speculate on non-scientific ones.So as blahedo alluded, evolution will only be accepted as ultimate truth when science is accepted as the ultimate framework. There is no way to "prove" however that science is the ultimate framework. That too is a non-scientific question.Science can no more prove creation (true or false) than it can prove that the answer to "What is Buddha?" is "Three pounds of flax", and it makes just as little sense to try.