The atheist's nightmare is yummy

I've read two interesting and somewhat related posts in the last couple of days, one on Boing Boing and the other on Slashdot. The first was about how scientists have now actually witnessed evolution in a lab. Scientists have been watching some E. coli bacteria in a lab for twenty years, through over 44,000 generations. They have noticed that around the 31,500th generation, some of the bacteria suddenly gained an ability that E. coli generally doesn't have (something about metabolising citrate — I won't even pretend that I understand the details). They managed to "replay" the evolution using saved samples of the bacteria, and found that something happened about 10,000 generations earlier that allowed this mutation to take place. The quote at the end: "The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events. That's just what creationists say can't happen."

The other is a old video of some nutbag explaining to former actor and current evangelist Kirk Cameron why the banana is "the atheist's nightmare" because "it is so perfectly suited to the human hand" and therefore must have been designed by God. This is just too funny. Here is another funny video saying that peanut butter proves that evolution is false, because:

1. scientists say that life can sometimes be created by matter and energy,
2. peanut butter is matter,
3. peanut butter is exposed to energy such as light and heat, but
4. we never find life spontaneously being created inside a jar of peanut butter.

Wow, got me convinced. If that ain't scientific proof, I don't know what is. Oh wait, a couple of quick questions — has anyone ever examined every jar of peanut butter ever created for any microscopic form of life that was spontaneously created? Because we know that if evolution is true, then the form of life that might be spontaneously created from matter and energy would be a single cell. Evolution does not say that you might open a jar of peanut butter to find a chihuahua or a platypus inside. Also, peanut butter has been around for about a hundred years, while the universe is billions of years old. Have we waited long enough to say that it's definitely not going to happen? Not to mention the obvious point that even if evolution is true, the possibility of this happening inside a jar of peanut butter is so low that the fact that you haven't seen it happen is not proof that it can't.

Speaking as an atheist, I can honestly say I have never had a nightmare involving either bananas or peanut butter. I ate a banana just the other day and quite enjoyed it. Cut one up, pour a little milk on it and sprinkle a touch of sugar, quite a nice little snack. I had an English muffin with peanut butter tonight when I got home from baseball. And ironically combining both nightmares, I used to love peanut butter and banana sandwiches when I was a kid.