If the prayers are generalized, then they affect both the control group and the treatment group equally, and the effect - if any - of these prayers fades into the background. They're not a confounding factor. And the fact that some members of the control group might be being prayed for by others is hardly a confounding factor, either - invariably they're still being prayed for less than the treatment group, so the control is preserved.
Okay, let me be less qualified. You are, simply, lying.
Apart from your implied assertion (not made explicitly, like because you know it's erroneous, and you knew I would call you on it)--such "studies", to whatever degree they could be said to be vaguely viable, are not, as a point of fact, unanimous as to their conclusion--which would be one of many preconditions to "proof". Secondly, as I personally find unbelievable that you would not already realize given your statement above, it is absolutely a "confounding factor", unless you did your control group candidate selection knowing all prayer categorizations which could be relevant, which you could not possibly, even theoretically, know. What's the age demographic of your two groups, per prayer for "elderly people"? Religious orientation, per prayer for "fellow Christians"? Current occupation, per prayer for "hardworking miners like me, facing lung disease"? You've controlled for all those, eh? Let's see your theoretical list of control group members, with specific descriptors, for the best possible case for a study.
Not going to happen. Such studies, while you accept them uncritically on the mere claim of being "studies
, are at best, pseudoscience on the part of those conducting them, and could be nothing other.
Nonsense. The fact that these studies are conducted proves you wrong.
And I've clearly refuted the scientific basis of all such studies, actual and theoretical. Refer to my post, as written. If you cannot create a viable control group, you have no scientific study--and there is absolutely no way to enforce a lack of prayer -worldwide- for a given supposed control group, as referenced by any form of abstract denotation, overlapping to an unspecifiable degree to indeterminable quantity with your control group, e.g. worldwide instances of prayer for "comfort for the elderly".
At least, you've simply asserted my position is "nonsense" in the face of a clear, cogent argument, and not simply modded me "troll". For that, I'll credit you above recent Slashdot standards.
As for limb regrowth, that can addressed along a number of consequentialist lines of argument, but I'm actually more interested in "whole body reconstruction". I think, if nothing else, we can agree that the mere passage of time will resolve this argument, when considered from either one of our respective worldviews.
It's quite trivial to devise a study where genuine adherents to the religion are given one group of patients to pray for, and another group receives no prayer, and compare the incidence of healing/recovery, etc.
Actually, it's quite impossible to devise such a study, because there is no way of controlling all prayers as a free variable. Aside from the implausibility of verifying "study compliance", e.g. certainty everyone is "properly" reasoning, "Well, my uncle is dying of cancer, but he's in the 'no prayer' group, so for the sake of the study, I won't pray, even though I think it might help and nobody is going to know"--you have the far greater, numerically, factor of generalized prayers. I think I can fairly say with certainty that prayers such as "Please grant healing to people with {insert study illness here}, or a peaceful passing, according to Your will and their circumstances", or some other statement quantitatively ambiguous from the study's standpoint, would outnumber the largest group you were able to actively direct in their prayer behavior by several thousand-fold, and these prayers would be unavoidably in-scope for the supposed metaphysical test. Personally, I think prayer behaves nothing like (and should behave nothing like) voting, but that's a separate item for... eventual... discussion.
Sorry, I've observed it. I do appreciate your claim to personal omniscience as to the content of everyone else's experience, however.
Thought experiment on such negative reasoning:
1. How many people would one have to interview to know somebody knows who really killed JFK? 2. How many people would one have to interview to know -nobody- knows who really killed JFK?
What you're really saying is that you don't have evidence following the methodology you prefer, despite the fact the particular religion at hand likely would see a certain injustice in granting equivalent results for someone dedicating actual effort to it, and someone willing to make the effort to say "gimme proof".
Well, yeah, interesting point on the "absolute scientific fact" thing (insofar as anything can be said to be so)--what we know as "absolute fact" is that "evolution occurs", but, oddly, few "pro-science" have any interest in advancing that--rather, the motivating premise seems to be "only evolution occurs", which not only isn't demonstrable fact, it isn't even scientifically testable. Wonder why the supposedly-purely-scientific insistence on the objectively and scientifically more-doubtful premise... what would it help them conclude personally... oh, of course, that's it. So, yes, another aspect in which motivation is interesting when making the least examination "behind the curtain".
Curious, though, were you objecting to racism on evolutionary grounds? That would be odd, since it almost certainly enhanced survivability of the functional social unit. Probably wasn't your reasoning... I'm sure there's some other aspect to your negative evaluation of it involved, whether conscious or subconscious.;)
I think you're making the rather-large presumption that people's actual primary interest is in "correcting scientific misperceptions", despite the fact that the only area in which many seem consistently motivated to attempt to do so is where it overlaps with religion. I'm quite sure that if every single Christian on Earth abandoned the Young Earth Creationism position, a significant subset of the populace (especially academia) would continue to bring it up for the purposes of attacking it all over again, ad infinitum. Might be because they don't understand "non-sequitur", and wish attacking a particular religious interpretation lets them conclude religion per se is invalid, might be Astronomy blog page hits ad revenue, might be the simple desire to mock somebody--I'm not sure, I haven't worked out all the aspects of the sheer philosophical parasitism of repeatedly relying on others' presupposition of what you repeatedly attack as false.
Though, this tends to create terminology confusion unless you make the distinction between typical perceptual "light", and the uncreated light of God, as the Eastern Orthodox do. Such a distinction being also a precondition to directly experiencing the latter.
'Some people might say it doesn't look a day over 6000 years. They're wrong.'
Correspondingly, some people might say that their off-topic sarcastic quips will matter in 6000 years. Likewise, they're wrong.
Such quips being a subset of their thoughts, all of which will be nicely irrelevant, along with all other likeminded people and all their thoughts, by then, naturally.
I see this isn't likely to be productive, in that, from my view, you are simply deliberately selecting the most egregious disanalogous examples by which to make your arguments. ID is nothing at all like "flat earth-ism". ID is much more akin to String Theory, in that it is a nascent, recent field of uncertain testability, and ID will in all likelihood make predictions which are found to be erroneous with regard to particular biological structures (e.g. Behe's position regarding the bacterial flagellum), however, that doesn't exclude the -process of refinement- natural to scientific endeavor based on an underlying hypothesis (e.g. the bare notion of Design). Perhaps "irreducible complexity" will have to be discarded as a proposal per se, perhaps not--at this point we have not enumerated all "candidates", much less exhaustively analyzed them. Point is, while I consider evolution a very strong model (again, please check your tendency to slip into characterizing ID as "anti-evolution", because it simply is not except with respect to the -scientifically untestable- inference that evolution is the sole causal mechanism in play; "evolution vs. ID" is wholly a manufactured false dichotomy), I am unwilling to a priori exclude an inference from investigation based on the notion I "just know" it will be unproductive. That is simply destructive to science. If Einstein (or current String Theory theorists) were treated anything like ID, as soon Einstein proposed the Cosmological constant as a refinement to his original position ("He admitted Relativity is wrong!"), he'd have been hounded out of academia -literally decades- before Relativity and all its predictions were tested, which was still in-process this decade.
Who is it that is "trying to counter evolution" from your perspective? Not I, not Behe, as he directly said at Dover. What you are concerned about being "countered" is not at all the scientifically-testable proposition that "evolution occurs" (few seriously suggest such a stance), but your restrictive, scientifically-untestable -implied- usage that "only evolutionary processes occur" as a causal model of human origins. You only care about the second premise, which you can't test, and isn't scientific in that respect--while arguing the first premise, which is scientific, but which nobody in this discussion is debating. Your explicit argument doesn't match your implicit intent, for your personal reasons which seem to me, obvious. However, I'm perfectly willing to simply wait and let evolutionary processes resolve this. Agreed?
So as I said there is no science supporting ID. Or at least no one has yet managed to come up with any valid science supporting ID.
You're simply defining "science" to be tautologically equivalent to the current scientific establishment's views, as filtered through what you want to declare they conclude. Same dance as the people saying, in the same breath, that there's "no science" because it's outside the domain of science entirely, then saying it's within the domain of science for the purposes of saying it's disproven by science.
Simply read "Darwin's Black Box". There is -extensive- science, directly called out, in terms of specific biochemical causal mechanisms for particular biological attributes. This is "science", the existence of the words on the page and biochemical chains is sufficient demonstration that science is present. This is simple, bare fact. What you want to do, is equivocate "science" to mean something that has nothing to do with scientific process, but to a particular scientific conclusion you like as represented by a majority you like at a particular point in time you like. That is not science, that is dogma. Again, whether any proposed examples of "irreducible complexity" will ultimately be validated has -nothing to do with whether it is science-, and the mere fact its being rebutted with science demonstrates it is within the domain of science. There is no such thing as "FAILED on all of the science", though I do appreciate your claim to personal omniscience as to the present and future status of all inquiry by all people regarding a particular inference.
Just to note, your, that is, Dawkins' regurgitated, "god of the gaps" argument is, simply, not merely -a- false dichotomy fallacy, but requires an -infinite sequence- of false dichotomy fallacies. Is it God, or is it physical process X? Was is Oppenheimer, or the President, or atomic fission that destroyed Nagasaki? Choose one.
We can construct an argument that is utterly dependent on repeating that fallacy over and over, despite the fact it has nothing to do with religious people's actual thought processes, and just go ahead and claim it does--or we can accept the reality of the basic, well-understood-in-philosophy notion of a proximate cause. Multiple things can contribute causally to effect X, on different levels, or in different senses. Stacking one's own failure to understand the notion of proximate causes and calling it religious history, well, says nothing historically nor logically--other than being informative about the "god of the gaps" presenter himself.
As a side note, you might want to consider reading some of the actual defining documents of religions, rather than religion per Dawkins' manufacture. It is completely clear there was no confusion at the tiem on what was part of the typical systematic behavior of nature, and what was miraculous. What people expected then is the same things as we'd expect today; we simply have a distinction in depth of underlying detail, not on ability to make natural/supernatural distinctions.
I said "proposed" quite deliberately. Whether a particular structure is in fact "irreducibly complex" is a question that is resolved by individual analysis--that's fine, that's science. I'm using the term to denote complex structures per se--"your bar", so to speak, is all complex mutations for all required transitions across the full relevant timeframe. That's the bar with respect to what I expect you actually care about, "evolution is causally exhaustive", rather than "evolutionary processes occur", because the latter is useless to your unstated-but-desired metaphysical inference.
Still, I think we can both look forward to the point when neither of us will have to use terms such as "plausible", when we can actually run the numbers and quantify it.
Read the Dover transcripts to find out just how much science there is to ID.
Yes, please do. Especially where Behe states directly he does not deny processes of evolution occur, rather he doubts that it fully causally explains all biological structures.
For more information on your "science vs. ID" false dichotomy, I'd refer the reader to a Freshman-level philosophy textbook on logical fallacies. For the testability of your -actual- position, "evolution is causally exhaustive", rather than your -professed- position, "evolution occurs", any reference on the basics of scientific method should do.
Calculate the probability of all aggregate mutations required for all proposed "irreducibly complex" structures, given the population size and timeframe?
Reasonable people will conclude at that point (technologically, within a few years in genetics), we have a "test". Unreasonable people will stare at any probability number whatsoever, blank out their mind and plug their ears, and repeat "anthropic principle" while stamping their feet.
The latter part, I hope, at least. I really want to see that.
Insofar as one simply asserts, without any testability, that evolutionary processes were the only causal factor in play over the scope of all history--and although today a scientist could "create" two clones of humans which would be causally separate from the standard direct evolutionary/reproductive mechanism, and, say, name them "Adam" and "Eve", God could not.
Alternately, you could conjecture there were humans pre-existing those two "clones", following an evolutionary set of directives, perhaps using some directly-evolution-applicable terminology such as "reproducing and holding dominance over other creatures" (understanding one would need to use language that would be comprehensible until humans developed the science and corresponding non-allegorical terminology), and then later, creating your special-case humans, with particular directives that were oriented toward theological objectives. Interestingly, that's exactly what Genesis says when viewed from an allegorical perspective, the first set of humans happening the sixth "day", the second on the seventh "day".
Such "relegation" is really simply a false dichotomy: "Did God do design activity at the beginning, or during, history? Choose one." I'll go with "both".
Yeah, I typo-ed. So, I'll offer another to compensate.
Do not worry, from morning until evening, and from evening until morning, about what you are going to wear.
Fortunately, it's from extracanonical Thomas--so fundamentalist or surreptitious atheist, you won't accept or understand this other than perceiving it as a rather mundane and redundant statement.
If Jesus Christ personally appeared in front of John Q. Creationist and said "Hi, John. My name's Jesus, the Earth is billions of years old and evolution is basically true,"...
What do you mean, "if"?
When you see your likeness, you are pleased. But when you see your images that came into existence before you, which neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!"
Correct. And in the valid scope of your observation that a rock fell, you can conclude that that rock fell. You cannot conclude that gravity is immutable.
Slashdot Mirror
If the prayers are generalized, then they affect both the control group and the treatment group equally, and the effect - if any - of these prayers fades into the background. They're not a confounding factor. And the fact that some members of the control group might be being prayed for by others is hardly a confounding factor, either - invariably they're still being prayed for less than the treatment group, so the control is preserved.
Okay, let me be less qualified. You are, simply, lying.
Apart from your implied assertion (not made explicitly, like because you know it's erroneous, and you knew I would call you on it)--such "studies", to whatever degree they could be said to be vaguely viable, are not, as a point of fact, unanimous as to their conclusion--which would be one of many preconditions to "proof". Secondly, as I personally find unbelievable that you would not already realize given your statement above, it is absolutely a "confounding factor", unless you did your control group candidate selection knowing all prayer categorizations which could be relevant, which you could not possibly, even theoretically, know. What's the age demographic of your two groups, per prayer for "elderly people"? Religious orientation, per prayer for "fellow Christians"? Current occupation, per prayer for "hardworking miners like me, facing lung disease"? You've controlled for all those, eh? Let's see your theoretical list of control group members, with specific descriptors, for the best possible case for a study.
Not going to happen. Such studies, while you accept them uncritically on the mere claim of being "studies , are at best, pseudoscience on the part of those conducting them, and could be nothing other.
Nonsense. The fact that these studies are conducted proves you wrong.
And I've clearly refuted the scientific basis of all such studies, actual and theoretical. Refer to my post, as written. If you cannot create a viable control group, you have no scientific study--and there is absolutely no way to enforce a lack of prayer -worldwide- for a given supposed control group, as referenced by any form of abstract denotation, overlapping to an unspecifiable degree to indeterminable quantity with your control group, e.g. worldwide instances of prayer for "comfort for the elderly".
At least, you've simply asserted my position is "nonsense" in the face of a clear, cogent argument, and not simply modded me "troll". For that, I'll credit you above recent Slashdot standards.
As for limb regrowth, that can addressed along a number of consequentialist lines of argument, but I'm actually more interested in "whole body reconstruction". I think, if nothing else, we can agree that the mere passage of time will resolve this argument, when considered from either one of our respective worldviews.
It's quite trivial to devise a study where genuine adherents to the religion are given one group of patients to pray for, and another group receives no prayer, and compare the incidence of healing/recovery, etc.
Actually, it's quite impossible to devise such a study, because there is no way of controlling all prayers as a free variable. Aside from the implausibility of verifying "study compliance", e.g. certainty everyone is "properly" reasoning, "Well, my uncle is dying of cancer, but he's in the 'no prayer' group, so for the sake of the study, I won't pray, even though I think it might help and nobody is going to know"--you have the far greater, numerically, factor of generalized prayers. I think I can fairly say with certainty that prayers such as "Please grant healing to people with {insert study illness here}, or a peaceful passing, according to Your will and their circumstances", or some other statement quantitatively ambiguous from the study's standpoint, would outnumber the largest group you were able to actively direct in their prayer behavior by several thousand-fold, and these prayers would be unavoidably in-scope for the supposed metaphysical test. Personally, I think prayer behaves nothing like (and should behave nothing like) voting, but that's a separate item for... eventual... discussion.
Sorry, I've observed it. I do appreciate your claim to personal omniscience as to the content of everyone else's experience, however.
Thought experiment on such negative reasoning:
1. How many people would one have to interview to know somebody knows who really killed JFK?
2. How many people would one have to interview to know -nobody- knows who really killed JFK?
What you're really saying is that you don't have evidence following the methodology you prefer, despite the fact the particular religion at hand likely would see a certain injustice in granting equivalent results for someone dedicating actual effort to it, and someone willing to make the effort to say "gimme proof".
Well then, we'll just leave your Bare Assertion fallacies as they are.
Interesting thing is, formal logical fallacies are even less plausible than astrology. Good luck with that.
As others have noted, astrology makes ongoing (daily, typically), specific predictions. Those predictions consistently fail.
It would appear that certain religions have an arguably better record.
Okay, then, let's try another--your -method of differentiation-, lacking a test, of which things are "idiotic crap", other than "'cause I say so".
With neither, as a useful methodology of any sort, your stance fails.
"...imaginary superbeings that were made up by some random illiterate guy some thousands of years ago..."
I await with anticipation your testing model for this hypothesis.
Well, yeah, interesting point on the "absolute scientific fact" thing (insofar as anything can be said to be so)--what we know as "absolute fact" is that "evolution occurs", but, oddly, few "pro-science" have any interest in advancing that--rather, the motivating premise seems to be "only evolution occurs", which not only isn't demonstrable fact, it isn't even scientifically testable. Wonder why the supposedly-purely-scientific insistence on the objectively and scientifically more-doubtful premise... what would it help them conclude personally... oh, of course, that's it. So, yes, another aspect in which motivation is interesting when making the least examination "behind the curtain".
;)
Curious, though, were you objecting to racism on evolutionary grounds? That would be odd, since it almost certainly enhanced survivability of the functional social unit. Probably wasn't your reasoning... I'm sure there's some other aspect to your negative evaluation of it involved, whether conscious or subconscious.
I think you're making the rather-large presumption that people's actual primary interest is in "correcting scientific misperceptions", despite the fact that the only area in which many seem consistently motivated to attempt to do so is where it overlaps with religion. I'm quite sure that if every single Christian on Earth abandoned the Young Earth Creationism position, a significant subset of the populace (especially academia) would continue to bring it up for the purposes of attacking it all over again, ad infinitum. Might be because they don't understand "non-sequitur", and wish attacking a particular religious interpretation lets them conclude religion per se is invalid, might be Astronomy blog page hits ad revenue, might be the simple desire to mock somebody--I'm not sure, I haven't worked out all the aspects of the sheer philosophical parasitism of repeatedly relying on others' presupposition of what you repeatedly attack as false.
Well, it is said that God is light...
Though, this tends to create terminology confusion unless you make the distinction between typical perceptual "light", and the uncreated light of God, as the Eastern Orthodox do. Such a distinction being also a precondition to directly experiencing the latter.
'Some people might say it doesn't look a day over 6000 years. They're wrong.'
Correspondingly, some people might say that their off-topic sarcastic quips will matter in 6000 years. Likewise, they're wrong.
Such quips being a subset of their thoughts, all of which will be nicely irrelevant, along with all other likeminded people and all their thoughts, by then, naturally.
I now propose a toast to Natural Selection.
I see this isn't likely to be productive, in that, from my view, you are simply deliberately selecting the most egregious disanalogous examples by which to make your arguments. ID is nothing at all like "flat earth-ism". ID is much more akin to String Theory, in that it is a nascent, recent field of uncertain testability, and ID will in all likelihood make predictions which are found to be erroneous with regard to particular biological structures (e.g. Behe's position regarding the bacterial flagellum), however, that doesn't exclude the -process of refinement- natural to scientific endeavor based on an underlying hypothesis (e.g. the bare notion of Design). Perhaps "irreducible complexity" will have to be discarded as a proposal per se, perhaps not--at this point we have not enumerated all "candidates", much less exhaustively analyzed them. Point is, while I consider evolution a very strong model (again, please check your tendency to slip into characterizing ID as "anti-evolution", because it simply is not except with respect to the -scientifically untestable- inference that evolution is the sole causal mechanism in play; "evolution vs. ID" is wholly a manufactured false dichotomy), I am unwilling to a priori exclude an inference from investigation based on the notion I "just know" it will be unproductive. That is simply destructive to science. If Einstein (or current String Theory theorists) were treated anything like ID, as soon Einstein proposed the Cosmological constant as a refinement to his original position ("He admitted Relativity is wrong!"), he'd have been hounded out of academia -literally decades- before Relativity and all its predictions were tested, which was still in-process this decade.
Who is it that is "trying to counter evolution" from your perspective? Not I, not Behe, as he directly said at Dover. What you are concerned about being "countered" is not at all the scientifically-testable proposition that "evolution occurs" (few seriously suggest such a stance), but your restrictive, scientifically-untestable -implied- usage that "only evolutionary processes occur" as a causal model of human origins. You only care about the second premise, which you can't test, and isn't scientific in that respect--while arguing the first premise, which is scientific, but which nobody in this discussion is debating. Your explicit argument doesn't match your implicit intent, for your personal reasons which seem to me, obvious. However, I'm perfectly willing to simply wait and let evolutionary processes resolve this. Agreed?
So as I said there is no science supporting ID. Or at least no one has yet managed to come up with any valid science supporting ID.
You're simply defining "science" to be tautologically equivalent to the current scientific establishment's views, as filtered through what you want to declare they conclude. Same dance as the people saying, in the same breath, that there's "no science" because it's outside the domain of science entirely, then saying it's within the domain of science for the purposes of saying it's disproven by science.
Simply read "Darwin's Black Box". There is -extensive- science, directly called out, in terms of specific biochemical causal mechanisms for particular biological attributes. This is "science", the existence of the words on the page and biochemical chains is sufficient demonstration that science is present. This is simple, bare fact. What you want to do, is equivocate "science" to mean something that has nothing to do with scientific process, but to a particular scientific conclusion you like as represented by a majority you like at a particular point in time you like. That is not science, that is dogma. Again, whether any proposed examples of "irreducible complexity" will ultimately be validated has -nothing to do with whether it is science-, and the mere fact its being rebutted with science demonstrates it is within the domain of science. There is no such thing as "FAILED on all of the science", though I do appreciate your claim to personal omniscience as to the present and future status of all inquiry by all people regarding a particular inference.
Just to note, your, that is, Dawkins' regurgitated, "god of the gaps" argument is, simply, not merely -a- false dichotomy fallacy, but requires an -infinite sequence- of false dichotomy fallacies. Is it God, or is it physical process X? Was is Oppenheimer, or the President, or atomic fission that destroyed Nagasaki? Choose one.
We can construct an argument that is utterly dependent on repeating that fallacy over and over, despite the fact it has nothing to do with religious people's actual thought processes, and just go ahead and claim it does--or we can accept the reality of the basic, well-understood-in-philosophy notion of a proximate cause. Multiple things can contribute causally to effect X, on different levels, or in different senses. Stacking one's own failure to understand the notion of proximate causes and calling it religious history, well, says nothing historically nor logically--other than being informative about the "god of the gaps" presenter himself.
As a side note, you might want to consider reading some of the actual defining documents of religions, rather than religion per Dawkins' manufacture. It is completely clear there was no confusion at the tiem on what was part of the typical systematic behavior of nature, and what was miraculous. What people expected then is the same things as we'd expect today; we simply have a distinction in depth of underlying detail, not on ability to make natural/supernatural distinctions.
I said "proposed" quite deliberately. Whether a particular structure is in fact "irreducibly complex" is a question that is resolved by individual analysis--that's fine, that's science. I'm using the term to denote complex structures per se--"your bar", so to speak, is all complex mutations for all required transitions across the full relevant timeframe. That's the bar with respect to what I expect you actually care about, "evolution is causally exhaustive", rather than "evolutionary processes occur", because the latter is useless to your unstated-but-desired metaphysical inference.
Still, I think we can both look forward to the point when neither of us will have to use terms such as "plausible", when we can actually run the numbers and quantify it.
Read the Dover transcripts to find out just how much science there is to ID.
Yes, please do. Especially where Behe states directly he does not deny processes of evolution occur, rather he doubts that it fully causally explains all biological structures.
For more information on your "science vs. ID" false dichotomy, I'd refer the reader to a Freshman-level philosophy textbook on logical fallacies. For the testability of your -actual- position, "evolution is causally exhaustive", rather than your -professed- position, "evolution occurs", any reference on the basics of scientific method should do.
Calculate the probability of all aggregate mutations required for all proposed "irreducibly complex" structures, given the population size and timeframe?
Reasonable people will conclude at that point (technologically, within a few years in genetics), we have a "test". Unreasonable people will stare at any probability number whatsoever, blank out their mind and plug their ears, and repeat "anthropic principle" while stamping their feet.
The latter part, I hope, at least. I really want to see that.
Insofar as one simply asserts, without any testability, that evolutionary processes were the only causal factor in play over the scope of all history--and although today a scientist could "create" two clones of humans which would be causally separate from the standard direct evolutionary/reproductive mechanism, and, say, name them "Adam" and "Eve", God could not.
Alternately, you could conjecture there were humans pre-existing those two "clones", following an evolutionary set of directives, perhaps using some directly-evolution-applicable terminology such as "reproducing and holding dominance over other creatures" (understanding one would need to use language that would be comprehensible until humans developed the science and corresponding non-allegorical terminology), and then later, creating your special-case humans, with particular directives that were oriented toward theological objectives. Interestingly, that's exactly what Genesis says when viewed from an allegorical perspective, the first set of humans happening the sixth "day", the second on the seventh "day".
Such "relegation" is really simply a false dichotomy: "Did God do design activity at the beginning, or during, history? Choose one." I'll go with "both".
Yeah, I typo-ed. So, I'll offer another to compensate.
Do not worry, from morning until evening, and from evening until morning, about what you are going to wear.
Fortunately, it's from extracanonical Thomas--so fundamentalist or surreptitious atheist, you won't accept or understand this other than perceiving it as a rather mundane and redundant statement.
Job 38:7
When the morning stars sang together, And all the sons of God shouted for joy?
Likewise, this can only mean literal stars that literally sing on literal 12 hour intervals, for 12 hours?
I often taunt my opponents with some ancient Bassui...
...as an added bonus, it tends to confuse them long enough to move into position for a second kill.
Your end which is endless is as a snowflake dissolving in pure air.
If Jesus Christ personally appeared in front of John Q. Creationist and said "Hi, John. My name's Jesus, the Earth is billions of years old and evolution is basically true,"...
What do you mean, "if"?
When you see your likeness, you are pleased. But when you see your images that came into existence before you, which neither die nor become manifest, how much you will have to bear!"
--Gospel of Thomas
You can conclude that the statement that particular instances of the phenomenon of gravity exist, is true as an immutable fact, yes. ;)
Correct. And in the valid scope of your observation that a rock fell, you can conclude that that rock fell. You cannot conclude that gravity is immutable.