how do you figure? if you mean that man has the power to break one kind of law and not the other, then i agree, but hardly see how it is relivant. or perhaps you mean one kind of law describes what "should" be done and the other describes what "is done, well ok, but i still dont see quite how it is relivant.

You made some statements about laws of the land and then made out that those statements also applied to laws of nature. I was pointing out that that argument was a non sequitur based on confusing two, importantly different, meanings of the word "law". Rewrite your argument using "law-of-the-land" or "law-of-nature" as appropriate each time, and see whether it still makes sense.

i also noticed you overlooked my mathamatical example.

Would you like me to do that one too? You wrote:

or take math, you can know and understand all the mathmatical equasions in the world, but it doesnt mean anything untill you actualy mesure something, or count something, right? just because i do math concerning my bank account doesnt mean more money gets put into it.

(That's the entirety of what I elided.) I missed that out because it was IMO well into the territory of what Bitt called "talking in riddles". I genuinely don't understand what you were getting at here, which made it difficult to argue against it.

First, i agree with your preference for the word "describe". Second, if what i have rendered above corectly reflects what you belive, then pardon me if i call it silly (since you've done as much with my beliefs). I can stand here all day and describe the mona lisa in intracate detail, its not going to suddenly appear on the wall infront of me, now is it? or, to take a more scientific example, i can sit at my desk doing equasions concerning the flight and path of bullets, but at the end of the day i still wont have a gun now will i?

Of course not.

likewise, you can talk all day about how an amoba woud evolve into yourself, but you still havent accounted for the amoba.

Indeed, there is still a gap in mankind's knowledge, right in-between "lightning-type discharges through gas mixtures resembling the early Earth, produce trace amounts of amino-acids" and evolution by natural selection. But a hundred years ago you would have as cheerfully pointed to mountain-range formation as something science had not yet accounted for, or 150 years ago magnetism or genetics, or before that celestial mechanics, alchemical reactions, or weather. Does it not worry you that your collection of gaps (there's another popular one about causation of the Big Bang) is forever shrinking? Was your deity more real when it had shrunk less, when people saw gods in planets and thunderstorms and disease epidemics? Will your faith falter when the Big Bang and cell genesis questions are cleared up?

If you can prove that science is fatally flawed by producing one phenomenon that science cannot explain, would you allow me to claim that theism is fatally flawed by producing one phenomenon, hitherto thought to be direct theistic action, that science can explain? I suspect you wouldn't.

So it seems that you agree with Lewis and me, in that, in order for our rational thoughts to mean anything they must be more than simply the product of our enviroment. The modern God-debunking psychologist and sociologist does not, i think, agree with you.

I think that there are truths which are not products of our environment, if that's what you mean: laws of nature and mathematical theorems were true back when Earth was lifeless and will still be true when Earth is lifeless again, however far in the future that is. Mathematical theorems, in fact, I would expect to be truths even in other universes with wildly different laws of nature. I don't think they need any souls or anything else metaphysical going on in order to remain true: they just are.

i dont see at all how you come to that conclusion. "He created the laws of nature" + "He created the universe which interacts with them" does not equel "the creator has no choice about how things happen."

Perhaps I wasn't being precise enough. Bitt had originally said that science, or more precisely the observed consistency of the laws of nature, doesn't prove there wasn't a creator, but does suggest that the creator doesn't interact with the universe in measurable ways: if He made choices about how things were going to happen, He did so in his choice of initial conditions, and since then the clockwork universe has been carrying on with no further operator intervention.

im still asking which you take to be the better man, the one does everything with the purpose of being the "fittest" for natural selection, or the one who regards truth, in and of itself, for the sake of being true, to be the most desirable thing? because if you say the man who goes for natural selection, then i say, "to heck with truth for its own sake, when it helps me survive, then truth is good, when it doesnt, i should toss it away as 'excess baggage'" on the other hand, if you say truth is important in and to itself, then i say that reaks of a morality not associated with darwinsim.

"Still" asking? Actually that's IMO the first time you've asked that question so clearly. And my answer is that evolution, which has bred creatures focussed on the survival of their own genetic traits, has poorly prepared humankind for living in the modern world's large social groups. (Large social groups, of course, being too new a concept to have had any significant evolutionary effect.) So human happiness is often best served by suppressing urges which evolution has hitherto selected by: xenophobia, the use of force to overcome disagreements, even prolific childbearing. My definition of "the better man" is the one whose actions better benefit human happiness. Of course this is not the same set of criteria as natural selection of hominids has previously used; I wouldn't expect it to be. Natural selection has no way of "seeing the big picture". Darwinism proceeds in an entirely amoral way, but I don't see it as paradoxical or surprising that it eventually produced creatures whose ability for reason and introspection allow for the concept of moralistic action.

Believing that Earth's flora and fauna arose as a result of evolution by natural selection, is not at all the same as believing that evolution by natural selection the right way, or even a sane way at all, to conduct modern human society.

Incidentally, even the man who lies and cheats to get ahead can still be a seeker of truth; it's hard to deliberately lie when you don't know what the real truth is. Deluding others, though not a moral trait, is sometimes an evolutionarily selective one (e.g. cuckoos); deluding oneself is probably not.

Faced with all the fake evidence for His non-existance that He planted

what evidence?

The evidence in favour of laws of motion, of celestial mechanics, of weather systems, of natural selection, of all the things mankind once thought to be the activities of a perpetually interacting creator but now have coherent non-theistic explanations of.

burying fake dinosaurs

i dont seem to recall saying the dinosaurs were fake, nor do i recall the bible saying they were fake, infact, i seem to recall the bible mentioning a few things that sounded like dinasaurs. further more the bible states that man was created after animals.

Okay, "burying fake dinosaurs" was kind of a gloss, but what I meant was faking up the fossil records of evolution and faking up the various physical signs of extreme age which inform palaeontologists' dating methods.

Of course, only some theists are the 4004 BC variety. Plenty of others believe palaeontology over the Book of Genesis. In that scenario, there's no need for fake dinosaurs: the creator abandons his position at Genesis (which at the time was a perfectly plausible theistic explanation of part of the real world) and falls back, retrenching at the Big Bang (which now is one of the few plausible places left to hide for a theistic explanation of part of the real world).

Peter