I think the OP’s faith in the Theory of Evolution is interesting, given the amount of hoaxes perpetrated in the pursuit of the Darwinian “truth”. Piltdown man and Peppered moths, anyone? We’ve had over a century now to find the missing fossils and still nothing. Yes, we’ve had lots of brouhaha in the atheist world over nothing… I’m thinking of the fossil that looks like roadkill that was highly publicized in the media a few weeks ago. LOL. There was nothing new there, except for the fact that this creature was the best preserved of its kind that has been found to date. Hoax after hoax after hoax, and yet she still believes. That’s the power of faith. Even atheists have it. There is a God-shaped whole in every human being. Atheists fill that hole with self-worship and the belief that our human minds possess the ability to understand everything there is to know about the universe. Atheists love science, in fact, they love science so much that they believe it belongs entirely to them! The history of the Catholic Church and science has been well-documented and much ignored by our Western culture, except for the twisted version of the Galileo Affair. I wonder if the OP realizes just how much of a contribution the Catholic Church has made to science. In fact, it was a Catholic priest that created the Big Bang Theory.
"It is all very well to point out that important scientists, like Louis Pasteur, have been Catholic. More revealing is how many priests have distinguished themselves in the sciences. It turns out, for instance, that the first person to measure the rate of acceleration of a freely falling body was Fr. Giambattista Riccioli. The man who has been called the father of Egyptology was Fr. Athanasius Kircher (also called “master of a hundred arts” for the breadth of his knowledge). Fr. Roger Boscovich, who has been described as “the greatest genius that Yugoslavia ever produced,” has often been called the father of modern atomic theory.
In the sciences it was the Jesuits in particular who distinguished themselves; some 35 craters on the moon, in fact, are named after Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.
By the eighteenth century, the Jesuits
had contributed to the development of pendulum clocks, pantographs, barometers, reflecting telescopes and microscopes, to scientific fields as various as magnetism, optics and electricity. They observed, in some cases before anyone else, the colored bands on Jupiter’s surface, the Andromeda nebula and Saturn’s rings. They theorized about the circulation of the blood (independently of Harvey), the theoretical possibility of flight, the way the moon effected the tides, and the wave-like nature of light. Star maps of the southern hemisphere, symbolic logic, flood-control measures on the Po and Adige rivers, introducing plus and minus signs into Italian mathematics – all were typical Jesuit achievements, and scientists as influential as Fermat, Huygens, Leibniz and Newton were not alone in counting Jesuits among their most prized correspondents [Jonathan Wright, The Jesuits, 2004, p. 189]."
There rest of the summary of the book *How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization *is here:
lewrockwell.com/woods/woods40.html
I think that any conversation with an atheist needs to be predicated on the understanding that faith and science are not incompatible. In fact, they are entirely harmonious. It is only by the existence of a logical Creator that we are able to study Creation, with the laws of Science. If the world had been created out of chaos, it would be chaotic. It is not. Hence we have the “Laws of Science”. Or as I would call it, the roadmap to discovering God through His Creation.
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