You've misunderstood me. Natural selection was a creationist idea (cf. Edward Blythe), and I regard its operation as tautological (that is, true by definition).
What is relevant though, is what power does natural selection have to drive change, even if mutational 'raw material' is available to fuel that change? I long believed its power was substantial, but my belief in the power of natural selection to drive actual genomic change has evaporated to virtually nothing in recent years.
Natural selection can prevent the most obviously lethal and defective mutations from spreading through a genome, but it turns out it can do practically nothing to prevent the accumulation of large numbers of near-neutral harmful mutations. And even when a beneficial mutation does occur the odds of it being fixed are quite low. The standard rule of thumb in population genetics is Y=2X, where Y is the % increase in offspring and X is the chance for the mutation involved to spread through the species rather than dying out. (This is for sexually reproducing populations.)
For example, let's say a mutation gave total immunity to a disease that kills 1% of a given population. All other things being equal, it would have a 2% chance of becoming 'standard' throughout the population eventually. The other 98% of the time it would die out by dumb luck even though it is beneficial. So the same mutation has to occur dozens of times to have a reasonable chance at being adopted, and this for a fairly remarkable beneficial mutation, as mutations go.
In the meantime, though, the 'mutational garbage' of near-neutral mutations just keeps piling up. With around 3 billion base pairs, a point mutation rate of c. 1 in 100 million (thus c. 30 point mutations/offspring), and hundreds more mutations from various transpositional changes, the human genome is in a state of inevitable deterioration. Natural selection is only able to fight a rear-guard action, and a feeble one at that.
The reason you and GGG are such easy targets is that you make a few simple logical mistakes. Primary among them is assuming as true what you need to prove. More pathological is assuming as true what you then claim to be false. So far I have never met any but creationist/IDers who fell into this logical trap.
The other principal fallacy in your arguments are that you assume that you can argue that which can only be demonstrated by empirical evidence, i.e. data. For all the criticism of the reliability of the data of others, at some point, you have to produce some of your own, and subject it to the same critical scientific public that everything else gets scrutinized by.
In the present case, you cannot argue that natural selection is a tautology, because it is not. Where I to see polar bears and black bears commingling in Rock Creek Park I would have to call the hypothesis into question. That it is obviously true is different from that it is true by definition. The sky is blue, but it is not blue by definition, but because of a physical principle called Rayleigh scattering.
No one has claimed that natural selection is the causative mechanism of change. It is not. Genetic variability and mutation is the driver of causative factor. Natural selection just determines which among the genetically altered lines of offspring will survive.
And as for your example, it is trivially irrelevant. Imagine instead a much more relevant example of a disease that kills of 80% of the population, randomly and with no genetic predisposition, but that a genetic mutation in 1% of the population subastantially reduces the mortality of the disease. The probability of a genetic line surviving even a few generations without that gene arithmetically approaches zero with extreme rapidity. In fact, the gene for lack of resistance would be viewed as a genetic defect.
And BTW survival of the fittest does not mean what the so-called critics of what had become "social Darwinism" thinks it means. Fitness to an environment does not necessarily require a mano a mano fight to the death male lion to male lion to survive. Some species are social and survive because of the development of a culture of cooperation (e.g. baboons). Sometimes it is just the ability not to freeze to death (polar bears), or the ability to nest in places predators cannot get too (woodpeckers). A mountain goat is not a vicious predator. It survives in places I cannot and a lion cannot because of superior agility in steep rocky places, and the ability to live by eating the local fauna.