The Problem with Christians

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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.

So, isn't this good evidence of evolution? Doesn't it take the theory and put it into law? Or is that never possible? Rather, why is evolution still just a theory when we can see it now with super duper microscopes and such?

There is no disagreement that this developed resistance actually occurs. The debate is whether the mechanism by which they develop it is a mechanism that can be applied to the development of all biological features. Bacterial resistance is usually the result of the cell gaining new genetic information that was already in existence. It takes up sequences from viruses (transduction), from its environment (transformation), or from other bacteria (conjugation). These new sequences allow it to survive. These aren't all the ways that they develop resistance, but in these examples there is no new genetic information being produced, it is just acquiring helpful genes it found in its environment. It seems that there are a lot of pre-existing mechanisms to keep bacterial populations alive. This may signify the ecological importance of such organisms. Life does not want us to get rid of them, probably for our own good. The fact that there are antibiotic resistance genes already in existence could be interpreted as a part of a design that intended to make bacterial/viral populations strong.  

And technically it is never possible to move it into law, but it can reach a point where it is unreasonable to reject it (which I don't think it is at that point). The reason people who are aware of this still debate evolution is because the way that they develop resistance is likely not sufficient to explain the origin of other biological systems.