Obesity, skiny, tall, short, unibrow, hairy, flat figure

[A-Man]

Forgot to address this. Evolution doesn't explain the origin of life, but rather how one form of life passes on to the next. In fact there could be multiple origins as far as I'm concerned. I would assume Someone Else was referring to "we" being modern humans having diverged from our ape cousins against the idea that modern humans were created just like that.

Yes, evolution has been tested. I'll try to explain as simply as possible:

1. Creatures pass on their genetic traits to their offspring. If you paint a red bird blue, his children will still be red, not blue.
   
2. Creatures must produce viable offspring. You can cross a tiger and a lion, but the resulting hybrid creature, while incredibly strong, is unable to bear children(not viable); its the end of the line. The fittest(most adapted to their present surrounding) survive only because they live long enough to mate while the unfit die before they can mate.
   
3. Suppose a type of bird that is always either red or blue. I neuter all red birds but leave blue birds alone. Because the red birds cannot reproduce and thus cannot pass on their red genes, the number of red birds will decrease or outright go extinct. The red birds don't necessarily have to be neutered by me, it could very well just have been that birds prefer blue over red and so blue birds mate more than red birds, or the red birds isolate themselves from the blue birds by living in some other part of the world.
   
4. To further illustrate the above red/blue bird example, this table shows the concept of dominant & recessive alleles. Suppose the red alleles are dominant(B) and blue alleles are recessive(b) - it'd mean that out of 4 possible combinations, only the combination where the child bird receives both recessive alleles(bb) will end up being blue. That means there won't be any carriers(Bb or bB) of the red gene, and by neutering all red birds, I've ensured that these birds will only ever be blue; red birds will go extinct.
   
5. Incidentally the table also accounts for a population trend, in my example there should be 3 red birds for every 1 blue bird (1 full red, 2 carrier red, 1 full blue).
   
6. Mutations, because sometimes the genes aren't copied correctly or are altered/damaged along the way. Most of these mutations don't do anything or are very subtle changes, and even then it only matters if these mutations get passed on to kids.
   
7. Which brings me to the concept of descent with modification. Using the birds example, even if I let completely dominant(BB) red birds mate, their child would still end up a little different from their parents. Suppose a child is always different from his parent by 1%. Is it a stretch to suggest that at some point, after maybe 100 generations in my example, the 100th generation bird is completely different from his 1st generation ancestor, to the point that if the 100th generation bird were to mate with the original bird, they wouldn't produce viable children? That's how we get many different species.
   

These ideas can be applied to many things, including explaining the emergence of drug resistant bacteria, overfishing leading to fish being smaller compared to many years ago, fossil records that support the concept of descent with modification, useless traits in our bodies like our appendix and useless DNA, domesticated silver foxes and dogs actually diverged from ancestral wolves. I remember coming across an article about some creatures(lizards I think) that were left alone in an isolated area and scientists coming back a few decades later to find that the original type of creatures are no longer there but instead finding a new species very similar to the original.

Yes, we did study that in the biology class in high school. Please know that I am not saying evolution is wrong as a concept, in fact, as you've mentioned, micro-evolution can be tested and provide with results immediately. Allow me to stress on 2 important points:

-First, evolution can't be directly tested to see whether this phenomenon was really responsible for development of life on Earth. Intuitively, one can just stick to the 2nd law of thermodynamics and get over with it; You can't keep shuffling cards and expect them to keep sorting themselves out, but they will just increase in disorder. Except in rare cases, for a short amount of time, things can happen when the cards will randomly start to sort themselves out. For that, scientists followed another not-so-direct approach to prove the concept of evolution, and that is by testing it on micro-organisms where changes can happen fast enough. But that is still not decisive, as even Physics itself can change in the duration of millions of years.
Also, evolution doesn't help explaining aesthetics at all - most notably the beautiful feathers of a peacock.
Therefore, you conclude that the singularity at the beginning of time MUST have contained very sensitive information and configuration that allowed life to develop as is; regardless whether the God created that singularity or not.

-Second, even if evolution is true (and it probably is, but I can't allow myself to put a 100% on that), that doesn't disprove God as a creator. One can say God created the singularity with its sensitive configurations for life to be self-driven like that.

So yes, evolution has been tested and in fact stands as one of the strongest theories we have in the scientific community, even better established than gravity.

Gravity, as we know it, is a fact that you can't deny. But the explanation behind it is not as strong as you think it is. So if we speak on how well the explanations fit into reality, then you're right.

My problem is more with the various doctrines attempting to describe god(s). If a scripture has mistakes/contradictions or can be overwritten, then its not infallible like followers claim and thus becomes unreliable. If the scripture is said to be metaphorical, then which texts can be taken metaphorically and which ones can be taken literally - and as a result spawn so many ambiguous interpretations and thus religious denominations? I'm forced to take the one with least assumptions etc as you said, in this case assuming its all literal and go with that interpretation. And of course, I still often find mistakes in scripture going by this route.

I don't currently have the time to watch your video, but I shall do that later. But have you really considered looking into at least the most common of them directly from a straight point of view and seeing for yourself?

It is also common nowadays to believe that god(s) are omnipotent and all-good (if you look at a lot of old myths, gods are often portrayed as jackasses with their own limited dominions who are born from something else). Problem is, a truly all-good God would not allow injustice or unnecessary suffering, yet that is what I see around me in the world today. I can only conclude that this God isn't good at all, or he is nowhere near as powerful as he is claimed to be. At best, god is more like a team of developers making a video game world, and then moving on to new projects after its done while the characters in the video game are none the wiser.

I'd like you to widen your field of perspective a little a bit. You can not assume anything about God (not even how he came to existence) because "where" (quotes because the concept of space might not even exist "there") he exists should not necessarily have the same rules in our universe. Likewise, you can't just assume God thinks, feels or anything of that sort, unless this was somehow told by none but Himself. What we know is that God could've caused the universe to work according to set of rules He puts up, and if that's the case, we're the players.

At the end of the day, even if the question about God is answered, is there anything we can do with the knowledge? If there's really nothing we can do with the knowledge, then we shouldn't worry about it. We should live our lives pragmatically, and in this case treating life as a limited one-time gift and that god is irrelevant is most pragmatic option.

Of course not. God's existence complies with Quantum Mechanics; that we all needed to be observed to exist. God's existence can serve as the explanation for "what was there" before the universe (our universe can't have always existed because it happens to have what is known as a "thermodynamical arrow time" as one of its properties). Plus, the fact that God exists can make many important implications, especially if a religion's teachings turns out to be true. The definition of the word "pragmatically" can also change from a person to another depending on whether he believes in a religion's teachings or not.