Do You Have a Monkey in Your Tree?

My educational background is mathematics, physics, engineering, history, philosophy and religion. As far as languages go, I can converse fairly well in Hungarian and German. In mentioning all these subject areas I mean to convey my interest in a host of subjects.

Darwin's evolution has come across my path many times. Some present evolution as a scientific theory and others present it as a religion. My classification for evolution is that it is theory and therefore belongs to science.

As a scientific theory, evolution, like any science, is subject to the scientific method, requiring that any theory is subject to being tested whenever a question arises about any facet of the theory; if the theory cannot explain the question, the theory must be declared false. Since there exist an infinite number of questions a theory must explain, it is impossible to prove any theory as conclusively true. That is the nature of science.  Thus Evolution cannot be called a Law, but a theory.

A good example of the danger of jumping to the conclusion that a theory works so well it can be made a law is the case of Newton's Laws Of Motion, proposed by Isaac Newton centuries ago, related to motion of all matter in the universe. They came to be called Newton's Laws of motion because they seemed to explain all motion.  Several centuries later scientists found a question Newton's laws could not account for.


But rather than discard Newton's Laws, scientists looked for a different theory that would explain a deviation in the orbit of Mercury around the Sun.  Einstein's theory of relativity, dealing with an increase in the mass of objects moving at high speeds, was able to account for the deviation in Mercury's orbit due to an increase in the mass of Mercury as it moved closer to the Sun at a very high speed.

So today Newtons Laws are used for low speed motion and Relativity used for higher speeds.  Both theories work nicely together but they are theories and not Laws.  Thus Evolution is a theory, but not a law, because there are so many missing links between so-called prehistoric man and modern man.

On the other hand Evolution cannot be claimed to be a religion to compete, for example, with Christianity.  Christianity and other religions are not based on science; they are based on faith, on belief in a supreme being we cannot, through scientific methods, prove or disprove the existence of.  There are some people who try to show that evolution and Christianity, for example, can explain one other.  This is impossible because one is theory and the other faith or belief.

Today, in education in our schools at all levels, the advocates of Evolution are trying to debunk religion's belief in God as being the creator of the entire universe; these advocates claim their ideas of humans having evolved from apes and monkeys are true.  But they cannot prove this and have a very unscientific attitude in claiming evolution cannot be questioned because it is the Law!

So, you can now answer the question as to whether or not you have a monkey in your family tree.