Vegans run the risk of B vitamin deficiencies (esp. B12)
Not really. It's pretty easy to live a vegan lifestyle without any B12 worries. You just have to ensure you have a large enough intake of it. I'll take that as a worry over heart disease, CJD, bovine growth hormone, not-fully-cooked-meat and the myriad other concerns that come with a meat based diet any day.
Just a guess, but couldn't you tell it where the light source is in the 3D image and have it calculate the lighting/shadows (as you would in any 3D scene) - get them to match up with the shadows you observe in the image, and use that to colour correct the textures
Interesting... what do you think the probability that there is some creator is? I honestly don't know... and if you don't have any idea, then you have to assume that the probability is greater than 0. Which means there is a possibility of the existence of some creator
I'd hope that much is obvious. Of course an extremely small chance is still a chance, but it's a chance so incredibly slim that it might as well be zero for the purposes of day to day life.
I am not saying there is absolutely definitely 100% NOT a God, or a Santa or Martian Teapots - in fact, I thought I'd made it quite clear that it's impossible to ever disprove such a thing. I'm just saying that these things almost certainly do not exist.
You ask me what I think the probability of their being a God is - I thought I already covered that earlier - Possible, but damn unlikely. I'd probably rate it somewhere below the chances of the sun not rising tomorrow. Now, I don't know the exact probability that the sun will or will not rise tomorrow. I don't need to know the exact figures - it's enough for me to know that it's a small enough chance I don't really need to stay awake worrying about it.
Our (severely limited) level of understanding is based entirely what we have been able to figure out sitting at the particular point in space that we have existed for the entire span of the species. So, I think that any argument for or against the existence of a creator is barely worthy of the label of hypothesis - an educated guess - because our level of understanding of the universe in which we believe that we exist is EXTREMELY NARROW.
What you're talking about here is a God of the Gaps. Nothing we know so far has given us any evidence to suggest that there is a God, so you say "Ah! But what about all the stuff we don't know! maybe there's proof of God in there!" - well, maybe there is, maybe there isn't. Maybe there's proof of martian teapots and whatnot too. Maybe there's proof of anything you care to dream up - we'll find out when we get there. Until then, we can only work with what evidence we have acquired so far, and none of that points to there being a God. The argument "We don't understand so it must be God's doing" is what lead to people believing that natural disasters were signs of God's wrath
translate "day" to "epoch" so when they say that God created everything in 7 "days" it could really mean 7 "epochs".
Yes, I often say "day" when I mean "epoch" as well. These things are so easily confused. I still often wonder why we don't get burned by the sun when it's only 7 feet away, too.
Please provide your proof to show there is no Santa Claus. Also, remember that he may have any or all of the following attributes: Invisible, hovering, silent, incorporeal, exists on a different plane of reality, magically unable to be detected by any possible means whatsoever.
But science has its own articles of faith (or assumption, axium, etc.):
- Things worked in the past as they do now. Thus experiments we perform now are informative to what happened back then.
We can only work with the avaliable evidence, and all the avaliable evidence points to this being the case. If there is evidence contrary to this somehow inevitably unavaliable to us (outside our scope of existence) then it cannot in any way impact on us and is effectively irrelevant
We're not just brains in vats, being fed false sensory perceptions. See above. Either the universe we exist in is to all intents and purposes real, or it doesn't actually matter in the least.
Our mental faculties are sufficiently good that proofs we judge to be true are, in fact, true. (I don't know about you, but I've sometimes been persuaded that a position was true, only to later conclude I was wrong.)
This is why we don't just decide to believe things because we feel like it. We accept something as true or false not based on what we might believe, but based on the avaliable evidence. Perhaps what you see as "red" is what I call "green", but we can easily measure and agree on the exact wavelength of that colour, however it appears to either of us.
Now, it might be the case that something we think to be true is later proven false by new evidence - but that's a good thing. It means we've learned more about our universe, and are one step closer to having accurate information about it.
As you say, there is no absolute proof. It is not 100% guaranteed for certain that the sun will rise tomorrow. It is, however, so insanely likely to happen that unless you're being incredibly picky you might as well say that it IS guaranteed. It's the difference between 100% and 99.insanely-long-string-of-9's% sure about something. On the other hand, if you're only 42% sure the sun will rise tomorrow, you either have security issues, or you know something about a planned hyperspace bypass that the rest of us don't...
Science will never present us with a peer-reviewed study proving once and for all that you should be good to your fellow man
Actually, I really don't see any reason why not. It's a simple enough experiment. Get three sufficiently large groups of people all equal in as many regards as possible. Group 1 are all shitty to each other for a year. Group 2 just behave like they do normally. Group 3 are all nice to each other.
At the end of the year, see which group has been most productive, has the highest standards of living, has the happiest people, or whatever other yardstick you choose to measure by.
I realise your point wasn't this specifically, and more that there are things that science can't answer for, but if you think carefully you might be surprised at how little actually cannot be answered by science (mostly philosophical issues, IMO)
But as Sagan said himself, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of abscence".
And there is no proof that a higher power/doesn't/ exist, now is there?:)
Absolutely correct. Likewise, there is no proof that Santa Claus doesn't exist, or that there aren't teapots orbiting Mars ("but we'd see them!".. "Not if they're invisible teapots", etc) What we can do, however, is assess the liklihood of these things being true based on the best evidence we have avaliable - and on that basis, it seems extremely unlikely there is a Santa or a God or Mars-orbiting teapots. Note that this does not involve or require faith - a common point of confusion with believers. I do not have "faith" that the sun will rise tomorrow, for example. I simply know that there's a high enough probability that it will, based on past experience that I'd be extremely surprised if it didn't. Faith, on the other hand, makes assertions such as "there are teapots floating around Mars" without any prior evidence to suggest that is the case.
Announcing the ALL NEW FORD PINTO! You too can have a car that explodes on impact, just like in the movies! Our advanced incendiary technology ensures that the least twitch of the wheel will send you plunging to your death from the precarious clifftop road of your choice in a spectacular blaze of glory!
Ach. If only they'd employed me for their marketing, they could've turned a PR disaster into the greatest automotive sensation ever.
Churchill definitely had some of the best quotes in history. He also looked like every baby ever born. It's true! all babies look like Winston Churchill. Quite scary, really...
Re: your friend's band. That's a surprisingly common story. An amazing number of top 10 artists end up in horrible levels of debt to their record companies, and even declaring bankrupcy.
There's a great article on the subject somewhere, written IIRC by one of those artists.. I can't remember where I saw it or who it was by, but if anyone knows the article I mean, a link would be much appreciated.
My regime would also bring back the dueling code, introduce breeding licenses and would impale criminals and enemies of the state during halftime shows
It's fuzzy liberals like you who give this country a bad name! You make me sick with your whiney soft-touch treatments and "rights of the criminal"
Halftime impalements? You might as well just give them an all expenses paid weekend minibreak to Hawaii!
Imply all you want, no one aside from the God of the bible can ever change my faith and I know that as a fact (even if you think its not). No offese.
None taken, and likewise, I hope you won't be offended if I point out that your reasoning here is circular (also known as "begging the question").
You say that the "only thing that would change your faith is God Himself", a statement which assumes from the get-go that God is both real and infalliable.
Basically what that boils down to is: "I know God exists because He said so"
Let's say I write a book. It contains three pages, which contain the following 1: Everything written in this book is true 2: Oranges are purple. 3: This book is never wrong
I now know for a fact that oranges are, indeed, puple - it says so right there in the book, and as we can see, the book is always true and never wrong!
I don't for a moment think that this is going to shake the foundations of your faith (indeed, if it has, you might want to have a serious look at your beliefs), but I hope you will at least acknowledge the cognitive disonnance you must engage in to hold certain beliefs.
If you are really prepared to examine your beliefs, may I suggest you take a trip over to The Skeptic's Annotated Bible which details many of the flaws, holes, contradictions, and other errors the bible contains.
Whoops. the bit about Giraffes living in the Atlantic was meant to say "Antarctic", not "Atlantic".. but come to think of it, either seems an equally unlikely environment.
Why do I always notice them half a second AFTER I hit "submit"?:)
First off, it seems I maybe antagonised you a little with the style of my first post - if so, let me apologise. Likewise, if anything in this post offends it's not intentional.
My point with the snowflake isn't that it's such a complex shape (I rather overemphasised that), but that it is considerably more complex than it's initial form.
You say that the driving force in evolution is competition, but competition doesn't actually achieve anything in itself. Winning or losing a competition makes absolutely no difference on it's own. It's the result, the "prize", if you like, of the competition that matters.
The prize, in this case, is life... the price of 'failure' is death.
As you say, the short necked giraffe did just fine until the long necked one came along - with the advent of the long necked giraffe came competition, and with competition came death. Competition is definitely one of the major components in deciding who lives and who dies, but not the only one, and so I stand by my original statement that death is the main directing factor in evolution.
In regard to traits such as a long neck having both advantages and disadvantages, you're spot on there. When you get a new trait, you take your chances with it, and it's pretty rare that a trait is ever either wholly good or wholly bad.
Ultimately though, a trait can be "totalled up" as being either a net advantage, or a net disadvantage. Do the pros outweight the cons, or vice versa?
As you say, we appear to agree on the mechanism (selection by death/reproduction) for change, but disagree on the force directing mutation.
At this point you say that you see the overseeing force as being that of God, deliberately mutating these creatures over successive generations to produce the desired result. This raises a few questions in my mind: Firstly, the form of the creature is dictated purely by God's will. That means it doesn't necessarily need to have any relation to the environment it lives in other than God choosing to make it fit. For example, if he chose to, God could have made it so that giraffes live in the Sahara, or the Atlantic, or anywhere else their necks would serve no useful purpose to them. Except, as we've already established, that wouldn't work due to their being horribly disadvantaged in such an environment they would die out.....but you also refute that, saying that there's little or no evidence for species dying out due to disadvantage in the fossil record, with them instead being wiped out by catastrophe.
So what does that leave us with? God is forced to play by the rules of evolution. Breaking any of these rules won't get him anywhere (as explained above), so he has to just go along and act like he isn't there.
As far as I can tell then, a world which came to be this way by Evolution (random mutation + selection), and a world which came to be this way by God's hand (divine mutation + selection) would be indistinguishable. In which case, we're back to good old Occam's Razor. So what, other than pure faith, leads you to believe it's God at work here?
[Lots of blahblah about how Michael Behe's Irreducable Complexity theory proves evolution to be flawed] Wrong, wrong, wrong. Behe's "Irreducable complexity" argument is flawed. I suggest you read up on it here and here
It's also worth noting that not one single biological system has ever been shown to actually be irreducably complex according to the criteria of Behe's argument.
What you fail to remember are the Laws of Thermodynamics and that entropy, chaos, is increasing
Oh, come on! This is really basic stuff! Even most creationists have abandoned this one by now. Heck, even the site that YOU cite (answersingenesis) lists this one on their Arguments we'd advise creationists NOT to use page (i.e. failed arguments against evolution)
For a more detailed overview, read this and consider the fact that you obviously don't know as much about evolution OR thermodynamics as you thought you did... so where else might you be wrong?
Okay, I'm only going to reply to one part of this, because otherwise there's just too many faults to cover.
the mathmatical (yes, let's use some science here) probably of it is CRAZY
1. Invoking the name of mathematics does not magically make something into science - try showing your math next time.
2. I presume the "insane probabilities" you're referring to here take form of the old creationist chestnut of "Evolution is like a tornado passing over a junkyard and leaving in it's wake a fully assembled Boeing 747" (or any similarly unlikely chaos-to-order event)
If that is what you're talking about, then you need to really examine what you know about evolution, because that's a stance so flawed that even the leading creationists and IDers advise it be dropped due it being utterly, massively, and demonstrably flawed. I've already pointed out the flaws in this argument here in this Slashdot discussion.
Sure.. here's two invaluable resources for you: Firstly, talkorigins.org - it'll tell you everything you ever wanted to know (and more!) about evolution, and how/why it can stand up to all the claims and accusations creationism throws at it.
Also, the Skeptic's Annotated Bible is a wonderful resource, detailing all the flaws, errors, contradictions, fallacies, and other nonsense in the bible. Critically, the actual bible part is a 100% genuine, unaltered King James Version bible, so nobody can pick fault with it saying it's "not a real bible", etc. I'm not sure how much use this will be in the case of a Jehova's Witness (I don't know much about how their beliefs differ), but it's a great resource at any rate.
Finally, you might want to ask around in the forums at Infidelguy's site which is a site dedicated to these sorts of issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Vegans run the risk of B vitamin deficiencies (esp. B12)
Not really. It's pretty easy to live a vegan lifestyle without any B12 worries. You just have to ensure you have a large enough intake of it. I'll take that as a worry over heart disease, CJD, bovine growth hormone, not-fully-cooked-meat and the myriad other concerns that come with a meat based diet any day.
I try to follow the "it's ok to eat anything that's really stupid" rule,
Shouldn't that make you a cannibal then?
And yes, pork should definitely be a problem. Google around a bit - pigs are pretty smart.
Just a guess, but couldn't you tell it where the light source is in the 3D image and have it calculate the lighting/shadows (as you would in any 3D scene) - get them to match up with the shadows you observe in the image, and use that to colour correct the textures
Interesting... what do you think the probability that there is some creator is? I honestly don't know... and if you don't have any idea, then you have to assume that the probability is greater than 0. Which means there is a possibility of the existence of some creator
I'd hope that much is obvious. Of course an extremely small chance is still a chance, but it's a chance so incredibly slim that it might as well be zero for the purposes of day to day life.
I am not saying there is absolutely definitely 100% NOT a God, or a Santa or Martian Teapots - in fact, I thought I'd made it quite clear that it's impossible to ever disprove such a thing. I'm just saying that these things almost certainly do not exist.
You ask me what I think the probability of their being a God is - I thought I already covered that earlier - Possible, but damn unlikely. I'd probably rate it somewhere below the chances of the sun not rising tomorrow. Now, I don't know the exact probability that the sun will or will not rise tomorrow. I don't need to know the exact figures - it's enough for me to know that it's a small enough chance I don't really need to stay awake worrying about it.
Our (severely limited) level of understanding is based entirely what we have been able to figure out sitting at the particular point in space that we have existed for the entire span of the species. So, I think that any argument for or against the existence of a creator is barely worthy of the label of hypothesis - an educated guess - because our level of understanding of the universe in which we believe that we exist is EXTREMELY NARROW.
What you're talking about here is a God of the Gaps. Nothing we know so far has given us any evidence to suggest that there is a God, so you say "Ah! But what about all the stuff we don't know! maybe there's proof of God in there!" - well, maybe there is, maybe there isn't.
Maybe there's proof of martian teapots and whatnot too. Maybe there's proof of anything you care to dream up - we'll find out when we get there. Until then, we can only work with what evidence we have acquired so far, and none of that points to there being a God.
The argument "We don't understand so it must be God's doing" is what lead to people believing that natural disasters were signs of God's wrath
Yes, it was a deliberate Dawkins reference. I should've really got Sagan in there too with the dragon in the garage :)
translate "day" to "epoch" so when they say that God created everything in 7 "days" it could really mean 7 "epochs".
Yes, I often say "day" when I mean "epoch" as well. These things are so easily confused.
I still often wonder why we don't get burned by the sun when it's only 7 feet away, too.
Please provide your proof to show there is no Santa Claus.
Also, remember that he may have any or all of the following attributes:
Invisible, hovering, silent, incorporeal, exists on a different plane of reality, magically unable to be detected by any possible means whatsoever.
But he's still real.
But science has its own articles of faith (or assumption, axium, etc.):
- Things worked in the past as they do now. Thus experiments we perform now are informative to what happened back then.
We can only work with the avaliable evidence, and all the avaliable evidence points to this being the case.
If there is evidence contrary to this somehow inevitably unavaliable to us (outside our scope of existence) then it cannot in any way impact on us and is effectively irrelevant
We're not just brains in vats, being fed false sensory perceptions.
See above. Either the universe we exist in is to all intents and purposes real, or it doesn't actually matter in the least.
Our mental faculties are sufficiently good that proofs we judge to be true are, in fact, true. (I don't know about you, but I've sometimes been persuaded that a position was true, only to later conclude I was wrong.)
This is why we don't just decide to believe things because we feel like it. We accept something as true or false not based on what we might believe, but based on the avaliable evidence.
Perhaps what you see as "red" is what I call "green", but we can easily measure and agree on the exact wavelength of that colour, however it appears to either of us.
Now, it might be the case that something we think to be true is later proven false by new evidence - but that's a good thing. It means we've learned more about our universe, and are one step closer to having accurate information about it.
As you say, there is no absolute proof. It is not 100% guaranteed for certain that the sun will rise tomorrow. It is, however, so insanely likely to happen that unless you're being incredibly picky you might as well say that it IS guaranteed. It's the difference between 100% and 99.insanely-long-string-of-9's% sure about something.
On the other hand, if you're only 42% sure the sun will rise tomorrow, you either have security issues, or you know something about a planned hyperspace bypass that the rest of us don't...
Science will never present us with a peer-reviewed study proving once and for all that you should be good to your fellow man
Actually, I really don't see any reason why not.
It's a simple enough experiment. Get three sufficiently large groups of people all equal in as many regards as possible.
Group 1 are all shitty to each other for a year.
Group 2 just behave like they do normally.
Group 3 are all nice to each other.
At the end of the year, see which group has been most productive, has the highest standards of living, has the happiest people, or whatever other yardstick you choose to measure by.
I realise your point wasn't this specifically, and more that there are things that science can't answer for, but if you think carefully you might be surprised at how little actually cannot be answered by science (mostly philosophical issues, IMO)
But as Sagan said himself, "Absence of evidence is not evidence of abscence".
/doesn't/ exist, now is there? :)
And there is no proof that a higher power
Absolutely correct.
Likewise, there is no proof that Santa Claus doesn't exist, or that there aren't teapots orbiting Mars ("but we'd see them!".. "Not if they're invisible teapots", etc)
What we can do, however, is assess the liklihood of these things being true based on the best evidence we have avaliable - and on that basis, it seems extremely unlikely there is a Santa or a God or Mars-orbiting teapots.
Note that this does not involve or require faith - a common point of confusion with believers. I do not have "faith" that the sun will rise tomorrow, for example. I simply know that there's a high enough probability that it will, based on past experience that I'd be extremely surprised if it didn't.
Faith, on the other hand, makes assertions such as "there are teapots floating around Mars" without any prior evidence to suggest that is the case.
Wow, that was unnecessarily long winded...
Road vehicles generally don't explode on a crash
Announcing the ALL NEW FORD PINTO!
You too can have a car that explodes on impact, just like in the movies!
Our advanced incendiary technology ensures that the least twitch of the wheel will send you plunging to your death from the precarious clifftop road of your choice in a spectacular blaze of glory!
Ach. If only they'd employed me for their marketing, they could've turned a PR disaster into the greatest automotive sensation ever.
You're probably right there. I know a nurse who has no end of realism complaints about medical dramas - Casualty, E.R., etc.
The irony is that it actually IS UNIX
Churchill definitely had some of the best quotes in history.
He also looked like every baby ever born.
It's true! all babies look like Winston Churchill.
Quite scary, really...
Re: your friend's band. That's a surprisingly common story. An amazing number of top 10 artists end up in horrible levels of debt to their record companies, and even declaring bankrupcy.
There's a great article on the subject somewhere, written IIRC by one of those artists.. I can't remember where I saw it or who it was by, but if anyone knows the article I mean, a link would be much appreciated.
My regime would also bring back the dueling code, introduce breeding licenses and would impale criminals and enemies of the state during halftime shows
It's fuzzy liberals like you who give this country a bad name!
You make me sick with your whiney soft-touch treatments and "rights of the criminal"
Halftime impalements? You might as well just give them an all expenses paid weekend minibreak to Hawaii!
Imply all you want, no one aside from the God of the bible can ever change my faith and I know that as a fact (even if you think its not). No offese.
None taken, and likewise, I hope you won't be offended if I point out that your reasoning here is circular (also known as "begging the question").
You say that the "only thing that would change your faith is God Himself", a statement which assumes from the get-go that God is both real and infalliable.
Basically what that boils down to is:
"I know God exists because He said so"
Let's say I write a book. It contains three pages, which contain the following
1: Everything written in this book is true
2: Oranges are purple.
3: This book is never wrong
I now know for a fact that oranges are, indeed, puple - it says so right there in the book, and as we can see, the book is always true and never wrong!
I don't for a moment think that this is going to shake the foundations of your faith (indeed, if it has, you might want to have a serious look at your beliefs), but I hope you will at least acknowledge the cognitive disonnance you must engage in to hold certain beliefs.
If you are really prepared to examine your beliefs, may I suggest you take a trip over to The Skeptic's Annotated Bible which details many of the flaws, holes, contradictions, and other errors the bible contains.
Whoops.
:)
the bit about Giraffes living in the Atlantic was meant to say "Antarctic", not "Atlantic".. but come to think of it, either seems an equally unlikely environment.
Why do I always notice them half a second AFTER I hit "submit"?
First off, it seems I maybe antagonised you a little with the style of my first post - if so, let me apologise.
..but you also refute that, saying that there's little or no evidence for species dying out due to disadvantage in the fossil record, with them instead being wiped out by catastrophe.
Likewise, if anything in this post offends it's not intentional.
My point with the snowflake isn't that it's such a complex shape (I rather overemphasised that), but that it is considerably more complex than it's initial form.
You say that the driving force in evolution is competition, but competition doesn't actually achieve anything in itself. Winning or losing a competition makes absolutely no difference on it's own. It's the result, the "prize", if you like, of the competition that matters.
The prize, in this case, is life... the price of 'failure' is death.
As you say, the short necked giraffe did just fine until the long necked one came along - with the advent of the long necked giraffe came competition, and with competition came death. Competition is definitely one of the major components in deciding who lives and who dies, but not the only one, and so I stand by my original statement that death is the main directing factor in evolution.
In regard to traits such as a long neck having both advantages and disadvantages, you're spot on there. When you get a new trait, you take your chances with it, and it's pretty rare that a trait is ever either wholly good or wholly bad.
Ultimately though, a trait can be "totalled up" as being either a net advantage, or a net disadvantage. Do the pros outweight the cons, or vice versa?
As you say, we appear to agree on the mechanism (selection by death/reproduction) for change, but disagree on the force directing mutation.
At this point you say that you see the overseeing force as being that of God, deliberately mutating these creatures over successive generations to produce the desired result.
This raises a few questions in my mind:
Firstly, the form of the creature is dictated purely by God's will. That means it doesn't necessarily need to have any relation to the environment it lives in other than God choosing to make it fit.
For example, if he chose to, God could have made it so that giraffes live in the Sahara, or the Atlantic, or anywhere else their necks would serve no useful purpose to them.
Except, as we've already established, that wouldn't work due to their being horribly disadvantaged in such an environment they would die out...
So what does that leave us with? God is forced to play by the rules of evolution. Breaking any of these rules won't get him anywhere (as explained above), so he has to just go along and act like he isn't there.
As far as I can tell then, a world which came to be this way by Evolution (random mutation + selection), and a world which came to be this way by God's hand (divine mutation + selection) would be indistinguishable. In which case, we're back to good old Occam's Razor.
So what, other than pure faith, leads you to believe it's God at work here?
[Lots of blahblah about how Michael Behe's Irreducable Complexity theory proves evolution to be flawed]
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
Behe's "Irreducable complexity" argument is flawed. I suggest you read up on it here and here
It's also worth noting that not one single biological system has ever been shown to actually be irreducably complex according to the criteria of Behe's argument.
What you fail to remember are the Laws of Thermodynamics and that entropy, chaos, is increasing
Oh, come on! This is really basic stuff!
Even most creationists have abandoned this one by now. Heck, even the site that YOU cite (answersingenesis) lists this one on their Arguments we'd advise creationists NOT to use page (i.e. failed arguments against evolution)
For a more detailed overview, read this and consider the fact that you obviously don't know as much about evolution OR thermodynamics as you thought you did... so where else might you be wrong?
This is obviously some new meaning of the term "good information" of which I wasn't previously aware
Some actual good info here though: http://www.talkorigins.org
Okay, I'm only going to reply to one part of this, because otherwise there's just too many faults to cover.
the mathmatical (yes, let's use some science here) probably of it is CRAZY
1. Invoking the name of mathematics does not magically make something into science - try showing your math next time.
2. I presume the "insane probabilities" you're referring to here take form of the old creationist chestnut of "Evolution is like a tornado passing over a junkyard and leaving in it's wake a fully assembled Boeing 747" (or any similarly unlikely chaos-to-order event)
If that is what you're talking about, then you need to really examine what you know about evolution, because that's a stance so flawed that even the leading creationists and IDers advise it be dropped due it being utterly, massively, and demonstrably flawed.
I've already pointed out the flaws in this argument here in this Slashdot discussion.
Pah.. don't you go using your complicated jargon to try and flummox me, you, you, you.... scientist, with your fancy "laws" and whatnot.
Everybody knows you can prove anything that's even remotely true by using facts. I'll stick to my Clarence theory, thankyouverymuch.
Sure.. here's two invaluable resources for you:
Firstly, talkorigins.org - it'll tell you everything you ever wanted to know (and more!) about evolution, and how/why it can stand up to all the claims and accusations creationism throws at it.
Also, the Skeptic's Annotated Bible is a wonderful resource, detailing all the flaws, errors, contradictions, fallacies, and other nonsense in the bible. Critically, the actual bible part is a 100% genuine, unaltered King James Version bible, so nobody can pick fault with it saying it's "not a real bible", etc. I'm not sure how much use this will be in the case of a Jehova's Witness (I don't know much about how their beliefs differ), but it's a great resource at any rate.
Finally, you might want to ask around in the forums at Infidelguy's site which is a site dedicated to these sorts of issues.