initial thoughts on evolution

Questions:

I thought I'd write up my initial responses to the following questions, before I read the lecture material.

1&2. Have humans evolved from vastly simpler organisms? Have other animals and plants evolved from simpler organisms?
How much simpler are we talking here? As in, from a single cell or amoeba, to some kind of amphibious being, to a simian being of sorts, then to neanderthals and finally to the modern homo sapiens we know and (sometimes) love today?

Perhaps.

I guess we all have to start from somewhere, right? I'm not much of a science buff, and I haven't really thought a great deal about where we all 'began'. My mind mainly thinks as far back as primitive humans, and anything beyond that, I've not contemplated. To me, this then implies that I've believed in God to an extent, in that I assumed that we started out as a simple form of human, and developed from there.

3&4. Does a belief in evolution lead to dire theological, moral and social consequences? Can a Christian believe in evolution and still be a "good Christian"?
"Dire" is a bit of an extreme word, wouldn't you think? I can see how a belief in the theory of evolution could affect a Christian's morals, and cause a inner conflict- I'm sure it would be fairly difficult to reconcile the notion of our beginning from a Big Bang, and the creation of Adam & Eve.. unless you were a bit of a religious scientist, and accepted the Genesis book in the Bible as more of a poetic description of God's Creation process, rather than believing that Eve was really created from one of Adam's ribs (I think that's how the story goes). I suppose that answers Q4 as well - I don't see why a Christian can't believe in God and Evolution at the same time, unless there's a passage in the Bible that specifically denies the concept of Evolution, and writes it off as a sinful belief.
Perhaps something more solid than a belief, i.e. an undeniable proof of Evolution, would stir a crisis in the theological world, and therefore have a social impact on the actively religious. Maybe you'd find a lot of people losing their minds, upon realising that there isn't a God. Or maybe they would not believe the proof, choosing instead to believe that the scientists had faked the evidence.

5. Does it matter whether we regard evolution as a "fact " or merely a "Theory"?
Of course. Accepting evolution as a fact, in my opinion, is to virtually write off the concept of God - unless you believe that God created the Big Bang. Then it wouldn't really matter. But if we consider evolution as a theory, no more and no less, then it allows us to keep our minds open to other possibilities of how we came to be, or how the world/universe began, et cetera.

Ok, now to read the lecture material.

I'm not sure whether I like this discussion on probability- that is to say, it feels as though our very existence is being dulled down to statistics and chance and complex mathematical equations that calculate the probability of things such as the chance of coin-flipping 100 heads in a row.

Continuing along this line of thought, based on chance and probability it is quite possible that human beings share a common ancestry with primordial slime, as William Provine suggests. Jumping back to Michael Denton's words that "to suggest that hundreds, thousands or possibly even millions of transitional species... were all unsuccessful... is verging on the incredible" - well yes, it is incredible. But I think it's possible too. We as humans like to think that we know everything, or we're on our way to knowing everything, but realistically we're nowhere near. For example, scientists and animal/insect experts (I've forgotten what kind of "-ologist" they are) are constantly discovering new species in the Amazon, just take a look at the news posted on the National Geographic website. And I'm sure that they've also missed a heap of flora and fauna too, what with all the incessant logging that's going on over there.

I think I have to eat some of my earlier words above, where I've said that I don't like the probability discussion - I've just read the review of the Theory of Evolution, and the concept of "survival of the fittest" is essentially boils down to probabilities. You have to be lucky enough to have the right genes or characteristics, or be able to adapt to your surroundings in such a way that you continue your lineage from generation to generation, and that's got a lot to do with chance.

The Selkirk and Burrows diagram reminds me of an article I read earlier this year (or possibly last year), about a new discovery that horses and bats are closely related. If scientists continue to find new links between different animal species, and perhaps even plant and insect species, maybe it's possible that scientists will reshape the concept of evolution as we know it today?