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However, don't argue that you do believe the bible. I'm not going to get off on that tangent. Its unimportant. Bible-creationists have plenty of material on the incompatibility of evolution and christianity. Atheists also have a bunch of material on the incompatibility.



No, atheists have no problem with the bible. You can interpret the bible in two ways:

a) Religious interpretation: The bible is a book of parables that contain a deeper wisdom.

b) Superstitious interpretation: The bible is a book of miracle stories that literally happened.

The normal Christian approach is a), therefore Christianity has no problem with science and evolution. On the contrary, I was even told in my Christian education that the bible supports the Big Bang and the Evolution theories. ("Let there be light" - that's the Big Bang. "God separated the light from the darkness" - that's the background radiation. If you want.).

Some Christian sects however interpret the bible as in b). As we've seen in this thread, that gets you indeed into a lot of problems with science and the scientific observations in our world in general - not only in evolution.

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When I'm getting trained on how to flip burgers at McDonald's, is it because my brain is mutating? Or do I just have the natural intelligence capacity to learn how to do my job?

Yeah, crows who do this might have an advantage, but they have existed without it for how long? Do you really think that they die off just because they don't know to put a nut under a wheel?

Or is it possible that they just learned how to do it because they're intelligent.



I hope your brain did not mutate on your burger job - although I've heard that awful things can happen on burger jobs, like losing your finger.

Biology normally attributes seemingly intelligent animal behavior to instinct. Thus I do not think that crows understand vehicles and traffic lights. If that were the case, they'd developed that behavior as soon as traffic lights were invented - but it was observed only sice 20 years.

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How did they know the star isn't just less bright, smaller, etc?



They didn't. At the beginning of the 20th century they just knew the average brightness of a galaxy, and had a rough estimate of the distances of close galaxies (Andromeda). Thus they could tell wich galaxy was close and which one was distant, but did not know much about their absolute distances.

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A gigantic assumption. For all you know, they've only been moving away from each other for 6000 years. If I see a car driving east past my house, I'm not going to just say, "Oh, it MUST have driven all the way from the west coast." I don't know where it started.



Even the bible does not claim that God gave galaxies a gas pedal.

If you observe a stone flying through the air, and know the law of gravity, you can precisely calculate from which place it was thrown. Besides, if galaxies indeed miraculously started their movement 6000 years ago, we would not see them move at all. Remember, light speed is finite and thus what we're seeing from galaxies happened a long time ago.

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How do they know, without making a few correlations or assumptions, what the temperature of an object billions of lightyears away is? How do they know what the 'initial mass' is?



The temperature can be derived from its color (blue = hot, red = cold). Every temperature is related to a certain mass and brightness. Thus, if you know a star's temperature, you also know it's true brighness, and when you compare this with its brightness in your telescope, you have its distance. There are a couple twists to this, but this is basically the method.

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We've seen space expanding? Or did this assumption just make more sense within the frame of the theory?



This assumption made more sense within the frame of the observations.

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Except it was decided that the big bang would produce variations in this temperature, and lo and behold they found variations (certain 'tropics' if you will). So how do we know what temperature to base this off of?




Not variations, but fluctuations.



The 2.7 Kelvin is the average temperature. The fluctuations in the above image are in the 0.1% range and contain information about the geometry of the universe.

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Expanding faster because if they aren't then the theory is bunk? Or because we have proof. Why did we only find this proof after the evidence contradicted the theory?



A scientific theory can not be proven, only falsified. In this case the linear expansion theory was falsified by the observations. Later the accelerated expansion theory was developed, which explains the observations.

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See what I mean. You can come up with all sorts of answers if you come up with assumptions first. You have to assume the way that uranium was created.



Yes, but if you have otherwise information you should urgently call the Pentagon and tell them that all their hydrogen bombs won't work. Uranium creation by nuclear processes in stars is based on standard nuclear physics.

I hope this makes the age of the universe issue a little more clear. If you still have questions, just ask.