Grateful,
It makes no sense to state an hypothesis in the negative. Thinkers and science attempt to prove positives. Proof of negatives is considered impossible.

The proper hypothesis is; All existing flora and fauna descended with modification from earlier life forms. Thinking beings then ask, "What evidence supports the hypothesis and is there any testable evidence to show that the hypothesis is false?"

As Einstein commented it would take only one re-produceable contrary result to show that his relativity hypotheses were false. In over 100 years, and thousands of experiments and measurements, there has not been one contrary result!

I look at the ancient writings of all people "born of woman", the writers of ancient religious texts included, to see if modern thinkers, writers and scientists have produced evidence to support the hypotheses of the ancients, including those of your religious text. Overwhelmingly, they haven't.

In an earlier post I traced the descent of species as best I could in the word total allowed. All primates shared a common ancestor after the emergence of the mammal from even earlier forms of life. Humans share from 90 to 98+% of their genes with monkeys and apes which shows beyond reasonable or sensible doubt that somewhere in the last few hundred million years we shared a common ancestor.

There is no testable evidence that shows the hypothesis as I stated it is false.

Out of the mouths of babes...

Last night my nine year-old son asked me why the chimpanzee he was staring at on the computer had a "human hand".
To which I replied, that it had a chimpanzee's hand - but that out two species were closely related.

Indoctrination is child abuse - Foyle.

Some indoctrination from cults and within some certain churches yes I agree Foyle, a little inaccurate to sweep all teachings under a label of child abuse, nevertheless, indoctrination affecting children exists within organisations and cults, in addition to Churches; Athiest groupings/organisations undoubtedly included.

Discussion of open ended questions in school for one hour per week from an early age will improve each child's cognitive ability (similar to IQ) by 6-7% and virtually eliminate bullying from the school environment. These are benefits which partly flow to children in the ethics classes to start now in NSW.

Excellent concept. These sessions have already existed within private schools across many Australian states for 30 years within a subject for .30 mins daily entitled 'Tutor Class', 'Home Class' and others.

It is wonderful that the public system are now introducing the strategy Foyle.

Intelligent conversation will rarely be achieved in an environment where most of the contributors share the shame dogmatic presuppositions. For that reason it is a shame that OLO remains an echo chamber of unbelievers.

Some discussion has been based around David Nicholl's philosophically naive version of atheism. The AFA's definition of atheism is, of course, nonsense. And the reason we know it's nonsense is that it DOESN'T even preclude theism! In other words, LOGICALLY one COULD accept that there is no credible scientific evidence for God and yet still believe in God on the basis of subjective personal experience (and readily accept that others will not consider that evidence to be credible), or on the basis of pragmatic type considerations and believe simply because faith in God works for them and they thus don't see any reason not to believe. Therefore, since it's possible to agree with the AFA definition and yet still believe in God, we know that it's an absurd definition of atheism.

There is much disagreement about exactly how to define atheism, but I am certain that we won't get anywhere if we adopt such an irrational definition suggested by these so called rationalists. Their definition is based on a faulty epistemology, and it implies that all evidence has to be be somehow objective. That's nonsense- evidence can be anything which makes a belief more likely to be true to an individual person. Evidence does not need to be of a scientific nature, as the AFA like to think.

We need to give some consideration to what evidence we would expect to see if God did, in fact, exist. A fairly basic principle is that "Absence of evidence for X is only evidence of X's absence if we would expect THAT evidence to exist in the case that X did exist". I doubt anyone would disagree with this principle. It is a very important principle to consider when arguing about God- which is what we're all doing here- and yet I find few people ever discussing it

Many atheists seem to write with the expectation that God, if he exists, would be like a magician who pulls rabbits out of hats on request, or that his existence would be heavily supported by evidence from the hard sciences which points specifically and obviously to his existence. Yet I see little reason to believe that either of those scenarios would be the case if God did, in fact exist.

I hope I've thrown some good food for thought out there and I'd love to hear your thoughts on my two points, namely 1. The absurdity of the AFA's definition of atheism and 2. The extra consideration God-debaters need to be giving to their presuppositions and epistemology, that is examining how they know about God's existence and the evidende we would expect to form knowledge of his existence.