How do you suppose I believe that mutations occur only when an opportunity for survival presents itself? They usually only PERSIST within a population (and perhaps rise to 100% presence in the population) when it confers some survival advantage.
Mutations happen all the time, there is no way to stop it as DNA replication is itself a mutagenic process. Mutations are usually selectively neutral, most mutations that are not neutral are detrimental (as the nylon digesting mutations would be until nylon was invented and available as a food source) and some are beneficial but only within a certain context (like mutations that make proteins that work better at higher temperatures).
This in no way suggest that mutations only HAPPEN when they would confer some advantage. Sheesh. Maybe if you understood even the rudiments of the theory you wish to criticize you wouldn't’ sound so ignorant.
==I believe in both abiotic processes AND God. What is to prevent God from using abiotic processes when HE commanded the Oceans to bring forth life?
What is to prevent God from getting life started by creating each original life form fully formed and fully functional?
The only way your argument that nylon-digesting bacteria are not DEVOLVING is if the bacteria created new information in response to a new environment.
If the bacteria is generating this information within the constraints of it's genome when it is stressed and did so in the past, then the evidence is merely adaptation, devolution is still valid and there is no support for evolution.
I don't think you think through the basics of your positions before you post them. You end up on both sides all the time.
"I believe in both abiotic processes AND God. What is to prevent God from using abiotic processes when HE commanded the Oceans to bring forth life?"
This is simply the fallacy of equivocation. You claim to believe in a god of creation, yet your god cannot communicate how he did things. He needs man to do that and man's interpretation does not need god. That is no god at all.