When someone asks me if I'm a "young Earth creationist" I know two things. First, they've never read what I wrote, second, that they probably couldn't understand me when I pointed out why "YEC" is bad religion and bad science.
That's even assuming they'd know the second half of that last one, why it's bad science. I doubt that most of those on the "Darwin" side could tell you much about that or much about Darwinism or much about science. It's more like whether or not they like the Red Sox or the Yankees or some football team or other. Though I've got more respect for baseball and basketball fans so maybe I should have left it at the football analogy. Atheists are generally more on that level "science rules, faith-heads drool" argumentation.
Of course I'm not a "YEC" and of course I recognize that evolution is the the best explanation of the evidence of the appearance and disappearance of life forms in the geological record, that is backed up, to an extent, by genetic evidence and physiological evidence. I don't believe that just saying "natural selection" is any more of an explanation of how different species evolved than saying we don't know what mechanisms brought that about. I am on record, here, of doubting there is one mechanism that explains that or produced the diversity of life on Earth and I'm on record saying that, since, by an enormous percent, the evidence that would be needed to know that is and will be forever lost to us so I doubt any explanations, even those which have substantial evidence to demonstrate their probability, will be more than scratching the surface of that. I believe one of the most powerful of "mechanisms" is chance which a. isn't heritable so natural selection is irrelevant to it, b. isn't any one thing so even to consider it a "force" similar to gravity is ridiculous.
I think that biologists wanted to have some nifty "force" like Newtonian physics provided the 19th century, hankering after the repute and cred (and level of arrogant) certainty that came with that, so they were eager to elevate natural selection to be such a force when the extreme complexity of living organisms and their individual lives, chance, environment, interaction with other organisms, etc. meant that organisms are not amenable to the same treatment as nonliving objects in motion in the same way. They are too individual to generalize about them, as individuals or the species that are comprised of individuals and so far more complex in the way that physics and chemistry can about atoms and molecules and even aspects of physiology considered as matters of those. Physics, especially of that time, dealt with far simpler objects and in far more reliably generalized ways than constitutes the entire history of life on Earth.
Show me you understand what I just said and maybe I'll answer your other comments that cut like a rubber knife.
I will say that whenever I'm forced to think about the origin of life, holding as I do with that one idea of Darwin, that all of present life on Earth was probably the result of a single organism that reproduced and, in time, mutated into other lines of reproducing, mutating life, thinking about what it would have taken for that first, Eve-Adam, organism to have assembled so as to start to metabolize, to sustain its life and, in a totally unprecedented way, to have successfully reproduced so as to not kill itself or its "offspring" - especially my assumption that the concentration of chemicals that would have inspired that first act of reproduction would have necessitated a containing membrane that would have had to break open, divide and reseal itself in both organisms, leads me to believe that such a thing couldn't be the result of anything but intelligent design. If the rest of it happened in the conventional, Darwinian way of random mutations subjected to what he thought of as "natural selection", I have no idea though I doubt it was much like the absurdly reductionist abstraction he imagined. But I can't imagine how incredibly improbable such a first and second organism in our line could have arisen by chance events in the hostile environment that, even in our time, is more likely to kill an organisms than to sustain it. Even Darwin pointed out that the largest number of organisms die without leaving progeny. And that was after billions of years of trial and error to have produced the possibility of that continuing.
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