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You guys are making your own "gimmies". I quote the definitions for Hypothesis, Theory, and Law straight from a pro-evolution text book (from the #1 text book publisher in the country) and Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary (the Gold Standard for word meanings).

These are either unbiased sources or sources biased in favor of evolution. The favor my position. All you can find for your own position are web pages specifically devoted to claiming that the Theory of Evolution is ABSOLUTELY TRUE because Law and Theory don't mean what the textbooks and dictionaries say they mean.

Why don't you spew a few more paragraphs of personal insult at me as "evidence" for your position? It is about all you have done so far.

Excuse post 341. Obviously, I was talking to someone else on another thread and somehow banged it off to you by mistake.

AM, can you remove 341 from this thread? It's pure confusion.

I don't see anywhere I have insulted you.

Unless you mean by insult that I don't think your definitions are the ones accepted by science.

Webster's is not a science authority. You cannot take their definition of evolution or theory and be sure it is what science defines.

The definitions I have posted are the correct scientific ones.

In any event, the whole problem with the literalist creationists vs. scientists debate is they are talking past each other. As long as the literalists insist on placing origin of life in the debate against evolution, there never can be a good faith debate of the real issues. (ID has as its underpinning the same literalist stance as creationism in general)

To give you an idea of the frustration of scientists with the bad faith of creationists, how would you like it if scientists repeatedly said that the reason the creationist position is evil is because your definition of the Bible is wrong. Whenever you debate, scientists would say your position is wrong because you did not include books that should be in the Bible, like the Iliad or some other secular book. You would get quite frustrated.

Then we would make up a whole group of nonsensical but logical sounding sophistries to show how science proves that this is true. "The Iliad shows that the flood never happened, because it took place about the same time as the flood, but there was no report of the flood in it."

So until creationists engage in an honest debate, instead of the trumped up one the conmen at AIG and ICR have fabricated, there will never be resolution.

Since I have given reasons why the theology of the creationists is seriously flawed and given the truth of the science position, it is reasonable to expect some movement toward acceptance of at least something I have said. But so far, I have not noticed any tendency of any creationist to move from the position they hold, despite the absence of any scientific evidence for their position.

As far as the theological position of creationists, I think it is weaker than the science. They don't accept the science and twist it to a great extent, but they twist the Bible even more. They do this my picking and choosing what they will say is literal and what is not. However, they choose passages to take literally that are clearly impossible to defend.

This translates to having to indoctrinate people in their churches into ridiculous convolutions of interpretation to continue to stay with their friends at church. Asking modern intelligent well-educated people to say that millions of animals were saved on a wooden boat or that woman was made from the rib of a man, but all animals were made male and female is ridiculous. Add to that the passage in Genesis 1 that says God made them male AND female at one time and you get to the point where you are insisting on cognitive dissonance to stay in the church.

I think this sort of brainwashing is at best harmful at worst evil.

You said this.

Your 234 is just evolutionists willing to change the long-accepted terms and ideas of science in an effort to cram macroevolution down our throat.

You are indeed appealing to the actions of the Evil Dumb Conspiracy to explain why scientists are correcting you on your misuse of scientific terms. Your evidence is that you quoted a science book in one place and a dictionary in another, so you must be right and it follows that the people disagreeing with you on this thread must be Evil Dumb Conspirators lying about you being right.

No, no, no, no. And yes, you're being a jerk.

I looked at your post queue for where o where you quoted a science text lately. This would seem to be it.

You (sneeringly)' "Really Why don't you use the Law of Gravity, as you know it, to explain how gravity works."
Me (with a bow to Sir Issac Newton) "Every object in the universe attracts every other object with a force directed on the line of the centers of the two objects that is proportional to the product of their masses and the square of the distance between the two objects"

Yes, the preceding contains an English sentence that corresponds roughly to the mathematical formula for gravitational force between two bodies. It might even be from old Sir Isaac's Principia, never mind what science text it was in.

It is a statement of what is going on, not of how. It is a statement of lawfulness. It is the Law of Gravity, not the Theory of Gravity. There is no word in it of "how," or even "how fast."

How does Mass A know Mass B is out there? Newton just flat doesn't say. It experiences a force.

Einstein says that the felt force is really the curvature of space, as reflected in the deflection of starlight passing in the neighborhood of the Sun. A thing falling under gravity--a meteor entering Earth's atmosphere for instance--is still in its own reference frame moving freely through space, but the space is curved toward an object in its environment so its track through that space appears to a distant observer to curve. The falling object experiences no force, "free fall" and "zero gravity" being equivalent, until the atmosphere gets thick and the fall is not so free.

Would-be quantum theories of gravity say that Einstein is basically right, but what happens is that massive objects exchange virtual gravitons (at the speed of light) with surrounding space. These invisible particles carry the force to the space itself. When massive objects move the space around them deforms to carry the gravitational field along with the object. This would seem to neatly tie it all together, Einstein, Newton, the whole ball of wax.

The only problem is that there are several candidate theories that claim to do this; there is just now no objective test to discriminate among them; none of them require fewer than IIRC eleven spatial dimensions ...

So three hundred years plus after Newton's Law (not Theory), we still don't have a single rock-solid theory of gravity.

What you did with the dictionary is irrelevant.

I will quote from Webster's New Collegiate dictionary (1981). Def. 6 for law states "a statement of an order or relation of phenomena that so far as is known is invariable under certain conditions".
Def 4 for Theory says" a plausable or scientifically acceptable general principle or body of principles offered to explain phenomena". 5 b calls it "an unproved assumption"

The definition of law is right. Science uses the definition of theory given in Def 4, not 5 b.

You have been pig-headedly wrong, and accused your correctors of lying for the Evil Dumb Conspiracy. That's the cheap conspiracy theorist cop-out and it don't fly.

Stop playing the victim and pull your head out.