If God is included then it is not ToE, as you well know…
TE is ToE with God included (Unspecified)
My contension has always been that ToE cannot achieve its goals without some sort of guidance from God. The mechanisms within ToE do not have God (Because He is not visible to science)
Round and round and round we go.
I think I have had enough now.
Richard
No, it means that science can’t detect or measure for God. Your statement is a non sequitur similar to saying someone who was murdered had no blood because no blood was found at the scene of the crime.
So astronomy, chemistry, cosmology, glaciology, meteorology, particle physics, quantum mechanics, volcanism, and all the rest are godless.
You can’t have it both ways, tolerating some science but rejecting a particular one on any basis you’ve stated; so far, every claim you’ve made as the basis for rejecting evolutionary theory applies just as well to geology or oceanography or whatever.
Neither do the thousands of Christian biologists out there who study evolution – yet you insist they in essence they are part of a godless conspiracy; that’s what is required if you’re correct.
Thus God sets the courses of rivers since the natural processes of the Earth’s surface function as parameters that constrain them.
[And that includes, BTW, a river that now flows the opposite direction from what it did on the order of ten thousand years ago.]
Richard, you are defining “ToE” as including specific philosophical and theological assumptions. As long as you make it clear that you are doing so, that can communicate adequately. But keep in mind that is not how many others are defining it - you can’t expect everyone else to use that same definition, and you definitely shouldn’t argue that someone else is implying something that uses your definition but not theirs. Defining the theory of evolution as strictly talking about physical biological processes, without trying to give it a particular philosophical or religious interpretation, is more useful scientifically. After all, it doesn’t take much thought to come up with ways to claim that evolution fits various views.
That’s a false dichotomy since ToE neither can nor does exclude God: ToE and TE may be the same thing, a possibility we cannot now without a Divinometer.
Yet you present no evidence! Since ToE is science, you must have evidence for any assertion about it, or at the very least propose a falsifiable hypothesis. Without such, you’re not making a scientific assertion but rather a metaphysical one, and indeed not a theological one, either because you present no argument from the scriptures.
And metaphysics in the end comes down to personal speculation, a dignified version of, “Well, it seems to me . . .” without evience.
Been there, heard that, think it is rubbish. Science can be criticised outside scientific boundaries. But scientists are unwilling, or maybe unable to argue that way so reject it as irrelevant. I am not going down that rabbit hole here.
You clearly either don’t understand or don’t want to understand what i am arguing so this stops now.
And I am not going to pitch Scriptures against science par se.
I have admitted that there is a basic scriptural basis to my argument but, as you ahe decided that doesn’t apply there is no point in expressing that further.
And that is the problem. It is not. because you are including an “invisible” God in ToE and that is not science it is faith.
Basically, whether you like it or not, you support TE not ToE but your scientific vanity cannot see it.
Richard
There’s that all or nothing thinking again.
Are you trying to be obtuse or clever?
Which ever, it fails.
It i an either / or there is no middle ground.
Either God is there or He is not. To claim He is there but hiding is just blindsiding.
If it was normal psychology it would be called bi-polar. One side science, the other faith and never the twain shall meet.
Richard
Aren’t you the one who said it is never all or nothing?
What I think you keep missing is that scientific theories don’t make universally negative ontological claims such as “God is not involved”. Scientific theories can only make tentatively positive claims, such as the evidence being consistent with known natural processes producing the biodiversity we see today.
It isn’t science saying that God is not involved when referencing natural processes. That would be you.
Thank you. I just can’t get away from the possibility of undetermined mutations and how that models with probability. Whether or not they occur is a question science has to consider and yet science is not in a position of making that determination. So it feels like an inescapable possibility for there to be unpredictable and unrepeatable truly random events that factor with mutations.
I dipped into The Creationists by Numbers and found this.
But in spite of the overriding biblical concerns of the leading clerical critics of evolution, virtually none of them insisted on compressing the history of life on earth into a mere six thousand years or invoked the Noachian deluge to explain the fossil record. Even Princeton Seminary’s rock-ribbed Charles Hodge (1797-1878) concluded that Darwinism was atheism because it banished God from the world and enabled one “to account for design without referring it to the purpose or agency of God,” conceded the great antiquity of the earth and gave his imprimatur to Guyot’s and Dana’s interpretation of the days of Genesis as geological epochs. And his disciple Robert Lewis Dabney (1820-1898), the scourge of evolutionists in the Presbyterian church of the South, withheld judgment on the question of geological ages and a pre-Adamite earth. 21
I was a little surprised it went back that far.
People could look at God Himself walking on two feet through Galilee and the Decapolis and Samaria and not see God; why should we expect more from science?
What’s this? People worshipped Jesus either becuase of the words he spoke or how he made them feel.
I don’t expect much from empiricism or rationalism.
At which point you’re no longer doing science.
I understand exactly what you’re arguing – you’re trying to force your non-scientific subjective reaction on science. No one is buying it so long as you keep trying to insist that science is something other than what it is.
Huh? That’s what you’re trying to get us all to do but we are refusing. You plainly don’t want science to be science when it comes to this one branch that bothers you. Everything you say applies equally to every other branch of science but you refuse to be consistent and call all of science godless.
Everyone here is trying to get you to let science be science and stop trying to force your metaphysics on it – all you have to do is recognize that when it comes to evolution you refuse to be scientific about it, that you prefer to rely on a subjective reaction that in fact has no foundation except your own emotions.
You’re the only one who is trying to include God in science, and you pretend that in the case of evolution science should do something unscientific.
Now you’re doing a YEC move. I don’t support either one – I just want you to be honest that you’re refusing to let science be science when it comes to evolution. I’m trying to get you to see that your statements about ToE are scientifically false and you should stop pretending they are scientific in the least.
Well, that’s one way to throw out the Incarnation!
Only if you have a Divinometer.
I’ve always thought Hodge was a bit nearsighted on the matter; his position was no different than someone saying that because we can understand the nature of oil paints and how they are applied to canvas then there are no painters.
Oh, yes – but I don’t know if Hodge actually called it “godless”.
Of relevance to the thread, and somewhat tangential to the point in the quote, (this is also a useful passage to point out to anyone claiming that the idea of an old earth was to support evolution):
"
Maybe not “godless”, but does “atheistical” count?
The conclusion of the whole matter is, that the denial of design in nature is virtually the denial of God. Mr. Darwin's theory does deny all design in nature, therefore, his theory is virtually atheistical; his theory, not he himself. He believes in a Creator. But when that Creator, millions on millions of ages ago, did something,--called matter and a living germ into existence,--and then abandoned the universe to itself to be controlled by chance and necessity, without any purpose on his part as to the result, or any intervention or guidance, then He is virtually consigned, so far as we are concerned, to nonexistence.What is Darwinism? by Charles Hodge
And some examples?
Yawn.
Young Sbeldon claimed that nothing doesn’t exist.
It is not that nothing does not exist, it is that it does not always have to be all.
How much milk do you put in tea or coffe?
Is that a case of all or nothing? There is nothing (aka black) but from then on…
Before you mock you need to understand the principle you are mocking.
Lol
Richard
Ps I should probably have added the word just.
It is never just all or nothing.
I’m not so sure about the “examined a fossiliferous deposit for five minutes” is true; I can imagine it easily taking half an hour. 
Not really – his theory is only “virtually atheistical” as pertains to individual specimens within the system, not as pertains to the system as a whole.
False dichotomy, Hodge! “Abandoned the universe” is neither a scientific nor a theological assertion, it is the result of an emotional reaction.
Yep, Hodge does not impress me.
“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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