Take the Atheist Challenge!!!

It has been observered to happen. Rrhain's T4 phage example is an excellent demonstration of it -- your incredulity notwithstanding. No, because science isn't about proof, and if you were as familiar with science as you purport to be you should know that. Proof, as they say, is for mathematics and alcohol. What science deals with is testable hypotheses and observational evidence. It should be news to you -- especially since Rrhain just described to you a simlpe experiment that you could repeat yourself in order to observe evolution first-hand. Ummm.... THAT'S evolution. It is proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Obviously it's not proven beyond creationists' doubts, but those doubts are unreasonable. "Creation" is too vague. There are hundreds of different and mutually exclusive creation stories, and every one I've come across is positioned in such a way to make it impervious to confirmation or falsification. That's why creation hypotheses are scientifically useless. No. What in the world does THAT have to do with anything? It's not supposed to explain love. Neither are the theory of gravity, quantum theory, nor the germ theory of disease. To ask such a question casts dubious shadows upon your claims to being scientifically literate. The point is that belief in God and acknowledgement of evolution are not contradictory, and your insinuations that it is have been sufficiently falsified by this counterexample.

I don't "think or feel it is so." It simply is. Evolution is what describes the changing frequency of alleles in a population of biological organsisms, and in the case of the T4 phage experiment, that is precisely what is observed. This has to be one of the most ill-informed statements I've read on this forum in a long while.Why should evolution be able to "explain love," according to you? Why not quantum theory for that matter? What does it matter to the validity of evolutionary theory whether or not I happen to believe in life after death? I never said that it was impossible, so what do you think you're arguing against? It obviously isn't my position. You've obviously never heard of the luminiferous ether.Besides, life after death is not an object in reality -- it's an idea. We discover THINGS in reality, but we invent ideas. No. It would only invalidate your very narrow intepretation of it. There are other interpretations that harmonize perfectly fine with evolutionary theory. Balderdash, and this lays bare your ignorance of the pragmatism of the scientific method. Unfalsifiable hypotheses are scientifically useless since they can never be tested against reality.

We don't, but we need not. To the best of my knowledge ANY biological organism's genes can mutate. Because they did not carry the allele for resistance to the T4 phage. No. Evolution doesn't work in terms of "forwards" or "backwards," "higher" or "lower," etc... Evolution just describes change -- ANY change. As species evolve, they don't evolve up and up like climbing a ladder, but rather they evolve "outward" in all directions like a bush or a starburst. Could have been lots of things, for example: radiation. Love is a psychological process whereas evolution is a biological process. I don't think psychological processes are adequately explain biologically. Evolution might tell us HOW we got brains capable of loving, but it will never tell us WHY we love. I didn't say there was. I said your interpretation of the text is narrow. Please try to stay focused on my arguments because I'm getting tired of repeating them. It is narrow because it refuses to recognize reality and does not consider that the language may be symbolic rather than literal. Excuse me, but Jesus didn't write ANYTHING that's in the Bible. What we have is hearsay retellings of old oral traditions. It'll take more than that, but I assure you that insisting that I must deny reality in order to believe as you do is quite the opposite of convincing. Perhaps you don't understand the meaning of the term "unfalsifiable" and how it describes hypotheses. If you DID understand what it meant, you would realize that your statement that I cited immediately above is nonsense.Unfalsifiable hypotheses will NEVER be able to be tested against reality.. you know why? BECAUSE THAT'S WHAT MAKES THEM UNFALSIFIABLE. If they could be tested against reality, even if not now but in the future, they WOULD NOT BE unfalsifiable. Those who propose them. Then give me a reason to believe that you're not. It's rather irrelevant in this case since I've shown quite clearly that you don't know what you're talking about.

I don't need authority to speak facts. We don't need to know whether or not the bacteria were "designed" to it to know that they do it, and what they do -- whether it was designed or not -- is evolution. It's part of it, but not all of it. Individuals don't evolve. Populations do. Depends on what you mean by "ape." If by "ape" you mean "primate," then we ARE STILL APES. If by "ape" you mean "gorilla" or "chimpanzee," then no, because we never were those creatures. We simply share a common ancestor with them. I invite you to peruse the evidence sections of http://www.talkorigins.com. Science is limited. It is not intended to explain everything, nor is it capable. If you think it is, then you don't understand science. No, I think you're misunderstanding. Science can tell us facts about reality, and if you believe in a God-concept that relies on reality being DIFFERENT than science has discovered, then THAT God-concept is falsified. God, in general, is unfalsifiable, which is why acts of God are scientifically meaningless. While this is certainly more relevant to the original topic of the thread, it's tangential and irrelvant to the points I was making. If a person thinks he's Napoleon, is that reality to him? Is that reality to you? That statement makes absolutely no sense. Whether or not person's "know the truth" has no effect on the unfalsifiability of supernatural hypotheses.

That you didn't get the point does not mean that it isn't there. The point is that from my perspective, no, it's not different. If God was indeed physically "feel-able," I wouldn't need you to tell me about Him, but I could in fact "feel" him with an independant measuring device the way photoelectric plates physically "feel" photons and record the interaction. Absent such an independant method of corroboration for your assertion, it remains equally as dubious as our hypothetical man's claim to be Napoleon Bonaparte.

Forgive me that I regard this statement as utterly laughable given the statements that followed it. Wrong. For example, science will never be able to explain my subjective experiences because science, by it's method, can only return objective facts. What in the world is "chance life" supposed to mean, and how in the world does it pertain to the limits of science? Again, where in the world did you pull this from, and what on earth do you think it has to do with this discussion?This message has been edited by ::, 05-13-2004 05:33 PM

No, I've been paying careful attention, and I regard your blithe dismissal as a rather thin and ineffective smokescreen. Care to actually answer the questions, or are you simply planning to continue stumbling on like the proverbial headless chicken?

Some semantical picking of nits... In the most literal sense, EVERY observation of the external world is indirect and inferential, and the only TRULY "direct" observations occur behind our retinas and between our ears. For example, the attributes of your computer monitor are those that you infer from the patterns made by the photons that bounce off it. Your observation of the monitor is not truly "direct," but is rather dependent upon a multitude of naturalistic interactions before the information finally reaches your cognitive centers.The reason I'm picking this nit is because I think it makes the case that the observation of common descent is basically as "direct" as the observation of one's computer monitor: both are inferences based on certain patterns that form in our observations. IMHO, the difference is at most quantitative, but not qualitative.