The Problem with Christians

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Need I go on? I could get into the parasitic creatures and fungal infections and bacteria/archaea, if we need to.

They think they're doing God a favor when they posit that he shaped all life's DNA by magic, but the problem is that if God used magic to deliberately shape life on earth, then he is a sick bastard. It's much kinder to God to say that evolution is the Creation process, as random and amoral as it is, and that God is not intervening in the natural world other than to save our souls after death...because if this is on purpose, then we need to catch and execute this deity for crimes against humanity. (And also the rest of the plant/animal kingdoms, all of which are similarly infected by parasitic creatures, including viruses.)

Read your recent comments and I really feel like I have a better understanding of the material thanks very much. I do have a question to your above quote (I deleted the images, didn't wana spam the thread).

Do we have evidence of small things, like bacteria and viruses evolving? I mean, don't they see how the flu virus changes in order to make the vaccine each year?

Archaea and Bacteria (which constituted all of life on earth for roughly the first 3/4ths of its existence) are observed to evolve all the time. An excellent example is the bacteria which evolved a biosynthetic pathway that allows them to "digest" (use metabolically) nylon, an artificial substance that didn't exist before 1935. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria

The evolution of bacteria under the fierce Natural Selection pressures imposed by our antibiotics has become a major issue in hospitals, as resistant strains of Staphylococcus aureus (among others) have become effectively immune to anything we can throw at them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methicilli...cus_aureus

As you noted, viruses evolve quite rapidly, due to the relative simplicity of their genomes, but we understand their evolutionary pathways pretty well--that's what the numbers in the H1N1 (etc.) Influenza virus refer to. In fact, because the Flu virus evolves as it moves from its origin in birds to pigs to humans, we look at the genome of the virus that appears each year in order to get ahead of manufacturing a vaccine that will impact the human version when it emerges. Sometimes we get it partially wrong, as occurred a couple of years ago, and the companies must scramble to make enough of the "right" version. It's why you must get a new flu shot every year; the old one usually won't work on next year's version, because it will have evolved.

It's also one of the major reasons people still die of HIV, despite highly-effective antiviral medicines; the virus population "learns" (by the deaths of those that have the wrong genome to resist the medication, leaving only the resistant ones to breed) to resist the cocktail being taken by the patient.