I am debating a creationist in my Biology class, and I am stumped on how to answer his response clearly.
Evolution isn't my strongpoint so I am hoping someone can enlighten me on what he's getting at and if he's wrong. (currently debating if Evolution is observable)
He says:
Ryan, what Joy was saying was that the big bang she believes in was the proverbial "bang" that may or may not have happened when God created the universe, she does not believe that God used the big bang, at least from what I see. As for the observability of evolution or not, we can observe (for example) that a wolf that has a gene that gives it bigger ears or whatever for better hearing/hunting will naturally do better than the wolves with poorer hearing. Therefore, the wolves with bigger ears should have increasingly larger number.
However, it is still a wolf. This is micro evolution. We can observe it. Where it goes into unobservable is where we have never seen a lizard evolve into a bird or vice versa(which by the way, is ridiculous, the bones of a reptile are solid whereas a birds are hollow for flight, also the scales to feathers thing is also messed up, the whole structure makes it impossible). Wolves to poodles to dingos to saint bernards to dachshunds, they are all still dogs and have not truly evolved from one species to another (macro evolution). As you said about dinosaurs, we can both see that they existed, you say somehow one species changed to another through natural selection, I say that God made them with the ability to adapt INSIDE the species.
People have tried to breed an animal into another animal, essentially speeding up evolution artificially. In every instance, they only got so far, then the DNA effectively wouldn't go any further, it just stopped. They tried to keep pushing the mutations but it wouldn't work. Another thing, any mutation results in a loss of genetic information, so you could breed a wolf into a poodle eventually, over a long period of time, but you could never breed a poodle BACK into a wolf; any adaptation/mutation is losing information.
Please keep it simple, I want to learn and educate at the same time.