The Problem with Christians

[TheRocketSurgeon]

So theories and laws aren't the same. There can't be a "law" of evolution even with the observable evidence of evolving bacteria and viruses etc? There could be a law of flu virus always evolving to fucks up our noses. But that wouldn't be the same as a theory? Am I remotely in the ball park of understanding this?

There are many laws contained within the Theory of Evolution. One of the most common is the law known as Natural Selection (co-discovered by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace), which states that the gene-sets within a population which are more "successful" (in that they survive to produce children and grandchildren at a higher survival rate than their fellows within the population) will increase the percentage of those genes found within the population, and thus the population will evolve in the "direction" of those genes. Another is the law of genetic inheritance, which states that offspring will mainly (along with "edits" provided by new mutations occurring with each generation) contain the DNA of their ancestors/parents, but will not be duplicates or blends of those parents, as Gregor Mendel discovered with his pea plants.

A law is an observed phenomenon which always occurs and can be described (usually mathematically), such as the Law of Gravity stating that mass will attract mass in proportion to the size of those masses and their proximity (and in the case of a large, nearby mass like the earth, will result in us falling "down" toward the center of that mass). The formula for that attraction is:



(F, the force of gravity, is equal to the two masses multiplied with each other and the Gravitational Constant, G, divided by the square of r, the distance between the center of those masses.)


The Theory of Gravity, which is actually several competing theoretical models (none of which quite agree with one another), attempts to explain why that occurs-- that's why it was such a big deal to have possibly/probably discovered the Higgs Boson, a particle that confers said gravitational attraction between matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_gravity

The attempts to resolve the conflicts between these theories, all of which accurately describe part of what occurs with gravity but which cannot be made to reconcile with one another (in much the same way that the Mercatur projection and the Conic projections of the globe both give different pictures, but are attempts to describe the same phenomenon-- the earth's land masses)... the search for a unifying theory for all forces between atoms/particles is called the Theory of Everything, and solving it is one of the major objectives of physicists today (thus all the giant particle colliders being built).

(Edit To Add: I mention the Theory of Gravity because no one questions the existence of gravity, or the phenomenon described by the Law of Gravity, but it is in fact significantly less well-understood and -supported than the Theory of Evolution.)