He started out sounding fairly intelligent. Very few grammatical mistakes, good grammar, and laid out his case fairly concisely. Things went downhill quickly from there, though. After explaining a strong piece of evidence for the common ancestory of humans and other apes, the telomere-telomere fusion of chromosome 2, this theist responded:
It's a common cop-out that evolutionists make, to try to psycho-analyze God. They claim that we have to understand the mind of the designer before they will admit that design exists. [....]Err... Okay, so no matter how much the evidence points towards evolution, since a god could in theory have made things that way and we can't know the mind of god, there can't be any evidence for evolution! Amazing... This is worse than the person who claims dinosaur fossils were put there by god to trick the unfaithful, because this guy won't even give a possible explanation.You have answered the way that every evolutionist I've spoken with does...you didn't answer my question and give me a piece of EMPIRICAL evidence proving evolution true. Empirical evidence is not "why else would it be this way." Empirical evidence is "this observable fact proves that it cannot be any other way." It's funny how many evolutionists don't understand the difference between scientific proof and assumption. They somehow think there is a difference between creationism and evolution, without realizing that both are belief systems. If there was empirical evidence for evolution, the theory of evolution would be the law of evolution. If there were empirical evidence for God, belief in God would be replaced with the scientific law of God, and I could show it to you. But faith is required.It also appears you're assuming yourself greater than God, if you are laying down the terms by which you will accept him (insisting to know why the numbers of chromosomes are the way they are before you will believe). If God is real, then he is greater than us, and we must capitulate to him, not vice versa.
He then went on (after claiming I refused to tell him my objections to god, though I had tried to as best as I could explain why I thought god was unlikely) to say this:
If evolution is true, then you and I are just accidentally-glorified globs of dust, and there is no objective reason for one glob of dust to care what any glob of dust believes about its origin. The fact that you and other evolutionists strongly argue the evolutionary viewpoint proves that at least something in an evolutionist doesn't believe that evolution is true. It would be inconsistent with an evolutionary worldview for an evolutionary-believing glob of dust to care so strongly about whether the ideas of a creationist-believing glob of dust were "right" or "wrong", when the very concept of "right" and "wrong" is contrivance made up in the minds of globs of dust. Once the globs of dust die, they lose their memory, and have no recollection of whether they were "right" or "wrong" about what they believed. So why even discuss it, if evolution were actually true? If evolution is true, why fight so strongly against intelligent design in the school systems? If we globs of dust blow ourselves to kingdom come with nuclear weapons, so what? Our existence was an unintentional accident in the first place, and therefore has no objective value worth preserving. These are the necessary correlaries of evolutionary theory, yet I have never encountered a person who truly believes these correlaries, or who fully acts in a manner consistent with them.*facepalm*
By the way, if any theists are reading this and think they are being represented unfairly by their fellow believers, feel free to speak up, either in the comments or in an email to me.
