Not sure what I deleted Erik! Possibly a reply to another comment entirely. Don’t get old.
The uniquely human ability, on Earth, to introspect doesn’t require divine intervention, any more than any other phenomenon possibly above existing, being. Evolution needs no help. Existence at all might.
I think you are wrong there. As it stands TOE is not coherent. It “assumes” progressions that it cannot itemise or legitimately describe. Time is not the ultimate creator. There are some things that cannot happen no matter how long you attempt them or what deviations you try to apply. TOE, IMHO, ignores basic physiology and Biochemistry failing to understand that similarity does not necessarily mean there is any connection at all. It might just be the only plausible structure to achieve the function (or one of a few variations). TOE relies on tracing back traits and forcing them into genealogies. Because it looks similar it must be!
Similarity is as much as symptom of design as it is Evolution.
Richard
We can observe progression in the fossil record. We can also see the progression of mutations through time using modern genomes and phylogenies.
It’s a good thing that evolution makes no such claim. Rather, it is the pattern of similarities and dissimilarities that points to evolution. That pattern is a nested hierarchy.
Phylogenetic signal is an objective measurement. It isn’t forced:
No description is necessary. No coherence is necesaary. No story is necessary. Here we are. Why fill in all your gaps with magic?
Cart before the horse
God rewards the righteousness
Sinners are punished
True, the longer your ancestors sinned, the longer you and your children must repent in righteousness, enduring your debt to bondage until you have paid the last penny
But those who never sinned are safe in their lands, whereas those who ever sinned are never safe, from humans or wild beasts
On earth until and on judgement day, God rewards the righteous “sheep” and punishes apostate “goats”
Carrot and stick, and the God in heaven is sovereign, the law of the land, all lands on earth and clear across the cosmos
Not what TE says
TE doesn’t say (natural selective) evolution needs help
TE says evolution (selection) on earth is given help, as the God in heaven intervenes into earth history, promoting the faithful and punishing apostates
The God introduces His carrots and sticks into human history
He does not let earth nature take its course, although it hypothetically could
But instead, Heaven tilts earth’s scales of selection, Providentially Governing the selection side of “mutational variation and selection”
Natural selection continues to apply to humans, in the background, but the foreground is dominated by the Divine supernatural selection process applied to “sheep” and “goats”
Why ignore mountains of “police reports” accumulated worldwide over thousands of years, of Godlike Heavenly Beings intervening into human history on earth?
TE doesn’t read into gaps
Is it a parsimonious narrative to explain widespread reports of Contact like events with perceived Heavenly Powers
TE doesn’t read into valleys
You are ignoring mountains of direct firsthand witness testimony
Riiiiigggght. I ignore nothing Erik.
And completely unprovable. It is a working theory which you want to work.
Without a time machine you have no concrete evidence. The closest to concrete is a fossil or thousand which you compare by shape and form that could be anything at all. If it looks similar it must be similar. “We know what the organs must have been !” What absolute arrogance! You can’t even decide now whether Dinosaurs were Ectothermic or endothermic. And all this stuff about feathers is beyond credence. There is more faith in TOE than in any religion I know. You get a mind set and grasp at anything that will support it. I know quite a few Christians who use the bible in the same manner.
Can’t you see that is just the same as saying “it looks the same?” A pattern? Is that a scientific word?
There is a Star Trek Voyager episode called “the witness” It shows how people interpret information to fit their theories. TOE does just that.
Richard
Any theory, provable or not needs coherence. TOE muddles on with conjecture and good will. “We are learning all the time”. Yeah right.
I do not consider my faith to have anything to do with magic.
Richard
Whose gospel is that Erik?
Our story telling mind needs coherence.
If you fill in the gaps in the historic and genetic and fossil and cosmological and existential and emergent record with magic, that has nothing to do with faith?
I have never denied that I have faith. Most Scientists that I have debated with deny it vehemently that they do.
I am sorry but I wish you would stop harking on about magic. It really is not the same thing. Magic is just a word for the unexplainable that has overtones or either deception or ignorance. A radio is magic to the uninitiated. A miracle can just be something we have not yet understood. My faith has grown over most of my lifetime, simplifying it into delusion or magic is really insulting.
I am not up with all the modern details of TOE but I have been discussing and following it for nearly as long as I have been a Christian. My ideas of Theistic Evolution predate Bio-Logos by about thirty years. It was been quite refreshing finding this site, but it does not really carry any Christian weight on a global scale. All I know is that I have watched TOE grow both in popularity and in acceptance without actually solving its most basic flaws and continuities.
Richard
That’s how science, rational inquiry progresses Richard. It doesn’t ever need to fill in any gaps with God. Just more rational inquiry. There are no rational, i.e. irrational gaps, begging only the supernatural. Magic. At all. At any point in endless creation. As Aristotle knew.
And again, what is ‘freedom’? And how does it justify suffering in any way?
Is the ultimate justification for TOE. I am sorry but it does. It has to be tenable. Instead it fudges its way on goodwill and “no other plausible theory”.
Until or unless we come up with a viable alternative TOE will run riot and God will never be that alternative until or unless proven. And by that time it will be too late to even care
please see my answer in the other thread we are discussing in…
Richard
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There is no viable alternative to the ‘TOE’, a.k.a. full physicalism. Why do you need one? God will never, can never be proven apart from by our dying. This is a bizarre reason for not having faith, for not caring. You want proof to fill in the gap in your faith. Faith doesn’t work like that.
Because it doesn’t work! It fulfils nothing. It fails.
God is not an alternative. God is not the antithesis of Evolution. Evolution is not the ultimate question and certainly not the ultimate answer. I do not need God just to defeat Evolution! As far as I am concerned they can work in harmony.
Setting up God against Evolution is for Biblical fanatics and fundamentalists, who find it a threat. I do not… But God is a threat to the pure Evolutionist because it introduces a factor they cannot comprehend, measure or even accept. IOW I argue Evolution against the Creationists and Creation against the Evolutionists! Thanks be to BioLogos.
Richard
I’m a pure evolutionist Richard and that doesn’t threaten God in the slightest. Why would it? He creates as if He didn’t. The ONLY hope that He IS, is Jesus. Not some other signature in a gap.
There are many who would disagree with you. The creation of man and his relation to God is fundamental to most views of God. Evolution marginalises God to the sidelines and makes humanity a fluke of nature.
Depending on your definition of “hope” (Will explain if necessary).
I wonder what you see the “purpose” of God is? If creation is not a part of it? Or why you would want to separate God from Creation.
The “God of the gaps” was a short lived terminology dismissed at the end of the last Millennium.
If God is involved it will neither be as just an instigator with no further interest or a tinkerer making little adjustments as He goes along. Either God Created or He did not. Evolution is just a process that is almost certainly a part of that creation. Neither need be exclusive nor competitive.
Richard
Aye, either God createS or He is not. He creates by grounding being. From eternity. There is no separation. There cannot be. His further interest is by incarnation. Evolution is creation.
Humanity, like all other introspective species, is determined in the laws of physics. And even God cannot determine them. But He realizes them if He is. He is the ground of their instantiation.
My hope, against hope, is that there is a transcendent meaning to existence as Jesus is the only hint of that.
The God of the gaps exists as long as irrational thinking invokes Him in cosmology, geology, biology, psychology.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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