... The evolution of the woodpecker has always been somewhat of a puzzle to me. Think of all the millions, even billions of woodpeckers that beat their brains out and died before that magical day when the shock absorbing material in the woodpeckers head was complete and the organism was able to both eat and live...

I'm not sure you meant this as a joke but, it went something like this:

The proto-woodpeckers would pick at the wood, gradually teasing a hole. Those that got shock-absorbing qualities found they could do it more easily and faster by pecking harder. They got to the grubs first or were more successful at hiding their food in the holes (or whatever the hell they do with them). Hence the mutant woodpeckers were more successful. Hence their progeny got better, and so on.

The thing about evolution that flummoxes me is cases like the following:

There's a wee bug (sheep tick) that burrows into the heads of ants and makes a snip in a certain part of the brain. The ant climbs to the top of a grass stem. The snipped part of the brain is what would have it go back down the other side. Instead it stays there. Thus the tick has a high platform from which to launch onto a passing sheep.

There's an enclosed pond ecosystem, somewhere in the world, that contains just vegitation and frogs. But the frogs are carnivores. But the frogs' progeny, the tadpoles are vegitarian. So the frog produces its frogspawn and later "farms" the tadpoles. i.e. It produces young so it's got something to eat. Some of course get away to continue the line.

Go figure!

Now, as for you creationalists, and people who take the bible literally, as the word of God - It wasn't - it was written by MEN, and, in the case of the NT, sometimes decades or centuries after the fact (in the case of the OT, obviously BILLIONS of years). How can what some (primitive in the light of today's science) men wrote centuries ago, as their theories, be valid nowadays. There are explanations for things like the parting of the Red Sea (misreading of the "Reed" Sea), pillars of fire in the desert (dust storms caught in sunset), etc., etc.

But, the more you look at the wonders of the world, the more you can ask yourself if the "Hand of God" wasn't involved in all this. And whether God's "days" weren't a few billion years in duration. I live on the south coast of Britain, famous for its hundred-foot-or-more White Cliffs. These were formed from the deposit of the exo-skeletons of trillions of tiny sea creatures, over millions of years, while this land was under the sea. Now the land is above the sea, and there are hundreds of yards of the remains of cliffs that have since worn away, over thousands of years, due to the action of the waves.

I think tha alone is all you need to debunk creationalism. Ask yourself "In the day that God made the land, etc., did he decide to make up part of it with the remains of creatures that he hadn't even invented yet?"

Nuff said.