Umm, I not sure they would agree with you on
- Verifiable process
- True dynamic theory (not sure what that means)
does not compute. why would survival of the fittest be random?
Random means not predictable. Non-random means that it can be predicted.
Can evolution be predicted? If so on what basis?
Dawkins says no.
@Paul_Allen1, I expect they would not agree with me, but until science has established a predictable process for evolution, it cannot be verified. Without a predictable process they have no true theory.
Hm good question. Doesn’t convergence indicate that environment causes similar pressures?
Also, we know how (and are learning how) genes and epigenetics react to the environment. Our bodies are wonderful machines that behave in somewhat predictable ways; even our minds are frequently predictable, to a certain extent.
Thanks.
As Randy said, good question. Convergence seems to indicate the evolution will reach a similar solution in reaction to the environment, though it may take a different path. Other seemingly random processes are also predictable. You can’t predict the stock market tomorrow, but it is a pretty good bet it will rise given time. The best team may not win this Saturday, but chances are in a series of seven games, the best team will prevail. Usually. Unless it gets down to the seventh game, then it is pretty much luck and the Astros blew it. But I digress.
So, random processes are not truly random most of the time. As Proverbs says, we throw the dice, but God controls the outcome.
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So this conversation on how evolution may diminish the majesty of God seems to have settled on randomness as the offending factor. I can understand why some would be offended to think their creator brought them into being by way of shooting craps. Perhaps the solution would to imagine creation as having involved masterful statistical analysis?
But the other possibility is that divine creation needn’t have been so centered on specific ends. A true artist finds the figure already in the stone. Perhaps the creator is creative that way?
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First and primary, throwing dice is a random process, but it is not a natural process. Neither are the stock market and sports contests natural scientific processes. The stock market and sports contests involve so many variables that they are not possible to predict accurately, but most people with a good knowledge of the situation can predict them reasonably well. They are not truly random.
Second, I would say that based on history it is crystal clear that evolution is fu3eled by changing ecological variables. Yes, it may be impossible to predict in advance what will happen because there are so many variables, but see time after time how this happens, so I support the convergence theory and make the wider claim that ecology is the ruling factor in evolution.
The problem seems to be that Darwinians do not want to give up their motto Survival of the Fittest and the accompanying claim of an unguided and meaningless creation. I do not say that Evolution itself is a meaningless process and thus supports atheism, but I see that atheists have worked to make Darwinian theory atheistic, that is unguided, and meaningless, and as a result unscientific.
It is time to make the Theory of Evolution scientific, which means not random. That is what ecology does.
A good question deserves a good answer. Isn’t about time that Darwin’s Theory became really a science that can answer real questions?
The only part of your answer that is good deals with ecology, but you continue to make excuses for “randomness” , which indicates that you do not take the good question seriously enough to seek a good answer.
I am thrilled to find another person who has left YEC and still sees God as the creator.
I see creation as a wonderful example of God’s power.
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I have wondered how those who take the early chapters of Genesis as literal history think the dodo got to an island in the Pacific and nowhere else after the two waddled out of the ark.
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sorry, missed your reply.
Of course it is not random as the survival fitness is the selection criterion, or do you think survival fitness to be a random trait? Whilst any individual has a chance of being wiped out by an asteroid, the fitness is determined by the the contribution to the system in which you try to survive. If you only take out of it the system will get you to fix the leak. If it doesn’t it’s doomed.
If survival fitness is the survival criterion, then we have a tautology or circular thinking which is not scientific. It is the same as random and or non-predicable in form and practice. I know that fitness is no guarantee of survival, but that is not the issue. It is defining and proving how natural selection works as a scientific process.
survival fitness is the selection criterion for evolution, not for survival fitness as that would not make sense. The selection criterion for survival fitness is the ability to stabilise the system against random interference like asteroid impact. As a system it is networking with sufficient redundancy that you can survive is one or even several nodes are destroyed. So we better work on our ability of leaving this planet before we make it collapse.
As the extraterrestrial said
The humans appear to be a lifeform so stupid that they developed the skills to blow up their planet before they had ensured that they had sufficient escape pods 
Not for me. If the human mind was the desired outcome, anyway. The chain of events leading up to it would be the most amazing display of falling dominoes I’ve ever seen. Far more majestic than making a mannequin out of clay and performing CPR on it. Squaring it with scripture is where I struggle.
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I could understand if a child interprets Genesis as God making mud pie humans, but for a grown up one should be able to go beyond that level of interpretation an recognise the poetic description of reality that Genesis represents. It describes evolution in a way that is understandable to children, the illiterate and the intellectuals alike.
To think of God as a Yoda like magician that puts every molecule in place by hand and lets the animals appear with abracadabra in a puff of smoke is sufficient for some, but not if you want to understand Genesis at a scientific level.
If you want to understand a metaphysical God that spoke reality into existence you have to think of words of love and logic that control the movement of energy and matter that form our reality. It is that feature that is life in its essence that is what we are part of.
To the old OP.
@MattReam, I feel for you. With you. I’ve been, I am, on a homologous journey. Our fundamentalist, grammatico-historical fairy tales are comforts of the nursery, of institutionalization: prison. And these childish things have been ripped away from us. The wisdom of age is the realisation of loss. As the ancients - Aeschylus - and Bobby Kennedy knew.
“[He who learns must suffer.] Even In our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God - To tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.”.
God is not God. Not our three to two thousand year old evolved story of Him, even with incarnation.
He is far greater, more complex, more subtlte than that. He is the ground of infinite, eternal physical and transcendent being. And He is helplessly immanent within the physical. I love kingly imagery, majesty, who doesn’t? That’s us helplessly yearning up.
Yearning with you - Martin
I’ve said it before somewhere. I say it often online and in person. But to me evolution is a creation that keeps on creating. Something God set into motion at some point that continues to showcase new creations. To me that’s way more beautiful that a creation that was created all at once and with the exception of some small change sis roughly the same forever.
This may be a crude example but it’s metaphorical and not literal.
Imagine if you created flour, sugar, and milk.
In one scenario that’s all there ever is. Those thing. They don’t change.
In the second after making those things and placing them into existence you jump forward millions of years and you see those few simple ingredients have become cakes, cookies, cupcakes and many other things. Additionally you see that those things have become cherry flavored, chocolate, vanilla, pumpkin spice and all kinds of tastes. You also noticed you have some that are simply designed and some that are so majestic it’s a focal point in big ceremonies and that there are so many mysteries locked away in them that people specialize and have hobbies just centered around them.
To me that second view is a creation that keeps creating and is way more lovely.
Law constrains God. It’s an intrinsic, inseparable, unavoidable aspect of His nature. Logos. If He does not exist, it’s still there. Because we exist. Logic, mathematics, their realization in physics and on up to morality are not arbitrary and are independent of God who instantiates them all, has to instantiate them all, if He is.
We have two somewhat different things here, Law and Logos (Reason.) They see different because we see Law as external, while Reason is internal. The Law tells us what we should do. That is an external constraint from God. Reason informs us what is rational and we are motivated to do to what is rational.
We at times may have a conflict between the Law from God and the Logos/Rational from our Mind. God does not have this problem because the Sources of the Law is the Father/Creator and the Logos is the Son/Logos. In other words the Trinity reconciles the Law and the Logos, and it does so through the Spirit. The Law is based on the Logos and fulfilled through the Spirit.
God uses the Law to inform humans the best way to live. There are serious consequences for telling lies, just as there is serious consequences to violating the laws of gravity. The point as found in John 1:1 is that the laws of nature are built into nature, which means that God the Creator created all things through God the Logos. they are all One even if they are different.
That is how we know that God the Trinity is. Because Reality is wondrously Many and wondrously One we know that God is Real. God the Father reconciles all things to Godself through the Logos and the Spirit.
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