You appear to be saying that because you don’t like coffee it means no one else is allowed to like it. Because you reject the ToE, no one else is allowed to accept it and must call themselves theistic evolutionists.
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That’ll do
If anyone claims that God is hidden in evolution they are changing the flavour and it is no longer ToE.
Richard
does a game loose its purpose because it uses a dice, is its outcome random?
The purpose of the process is the propagation of life. Its controlled by a feedback loop called survival fitness. Now as a Christian you should understand what survival fitness is about as Jesus told us what its all bout: to love thy neighbour like thy own
(not oneself) If you are only of use you have no place in creation, you are waste of resources. If you are however of use to others they will also support your existence.
This law of nature is sometimes also understood to be the word of God and it leads to increasing complexity and variety which in itself leads to stability.
Why do you believe the “Brights” as they call themselves - or “Selfies” as I call them, who tell you survival fitness is about who ***** feeds and fights fastest? Do you also believe in their interpretation of the Bible?
Nope – you’re reading into it.
Proof? No – just the testimony of scripture.
Not in the least.
That’s a view that arises from failure to actually understand.
Neither does the weather forecast, or a volcano erupting, or a myriad other things that science tries to describe.
Basically your argument boils down to “I can’t imagine how it works so it doesn’t”.
That has been explained repeatedly in a variety of different ways.
“Thou art a God who hides Himself”.
The problem is that you can’t see that all the arguments you put forth apply just as well to all of science.
Bingo.
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The real argument is that you can’t imagine how something could happen, so you conclude that it can’t.
Except that statement is flat out wrong. God is hidden in everything, and no more in evolution than in geology or astronomy.
nicely said. He is hidden in science as in the comprehensibility of reality. Its just sad to se that more and more are ignorant to it, lobottomised by social media 
God is not hiding. I can see God’s hand in meteorology. I Can see God,s hand in nearly all that science understands . But I cannot see God’s hand in ToE.
And that is the difference.
Richard
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its clearly the feedback loop, survival of the fittest. once you realize it to be the ability to serve creation and the propagation of life in general - it should be obvious. Its got no time for narcissism.
No. God does not step on the weak, or bless the cruel and powerful.
No, ToE is based upon the strong overpowering the weak. The God I know would not invent or use such a system. if He did I would not want to know Him let alone worship Him. ToE is godless, not because science cannot see Him but because it does not reflect what God stands for. Science does not see morality either. The world is amoral. It neither favours the predator nor the prey. ToE is immoral because it favours the strong. How can you not understand this?
Richard
That’s not a truth about ToE, it’s a truth about Richard – plenty of people see God in evolution, and some conclude from it that there must be a Designer and begin a search for God.
How can it be immoral when it’s God who gives prey to the predator?
Besides which, ToE “favours the strong” because nature does. I saw that play out one day when there was a seagull with a broken leg unable to get into the air to fly, and I wondered what happened to crippled seagulls. Moments later I found out for at least that one case: an eagle swooped down and grabbed that seagull.
I’ve also seen a deer get taken down by a big cat, and a chicken get taken by a house cat.
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might help you to get over your misconception.
survival fitness is the ability to love thy neighbour, e.g. to be useful to creation. If one poisons ones well by ones selfishness you delete yourself from the genepool - and if not by ones own stupidity the others will see to it.
No it does not. Nature is amoral. It favours neither the predator or the prey. It cannot because if one or the other gets the upper hand the balance is lost. Each needs the other. If the prey is wiped out the predator dies. if the predator is wiped out the prey runs amok. Your examples are too specific involving injury. Injury is the killer not the predator. If the predator is injured it will more than likely die because it can no longer catch it’s prey.
ToE wipes out the opposition for no other reason than they are opposition. That is self seeking and immoral.
It is not about the individual.
Selfishness is not a good trait. History shows that if a group work together they will do better than one selfish being.
Because God also gives the defense mechanisms to the prey which balance it out.
It would appear that you are not so hot on ecology.
The world is finely tuned. That is the sign of God. ToE is chaotic, random and cruel. That is not the sign of God
Richard
ToE is not chaotic or random, although some processes are mathematically chaotic and change events do play a role.
We may define the words ‘chaotic’ and ‘random’ in a different way but if evolution would be truly chaotic and random, I would expect to see all kinds of creatures in all environments. What I see is logical sorting of individuals to environments where they can thrive. There is even a possibility to predict the direction of evolution based on the quality of the environment. For example, aquatic environments favour different kind of morphology than ecosystems on dry land.
Is ToE cruel? Depends on what you mean by cruel. If you eat meat, an animal needs to die. If a predator eats an animal, the same happens. If all animals could live without anyone killing them, that would lead to overcrowding, starvation and probably mass deaths. I would not classify killing of other animals by predators as cruel. That some animals are killed and some others survive and produce offspring, is not cruel, in the sense I understand the word ‘cruel’.
Yes, it is. The deviations are random… Whether they are appropriate or not is chaotic… The result is only order because that is the only result possible. Chaos has to be rectified.
Furthermore it is not about predation it is about competition. Competition within a species and between species for a niche. The loser dies out. There is no saviour.
Why? it is the environment that controls who lives there not the evolutionary changes.
However, if it is truly random there is no reason not to have Pegassi or Griffins. It is this that indicates something more than just random but ToE cannot account for it. Within the workings of ToE there is nothing to stop cross species attributes, yet, apart from the basic limb formation and metablisms they do not often exist. There is nothing within the understanding of ToE that dictates shape and form other than survival. If it works, it stays.
Richard
You can’t think of a reason why a bird and a mammal couldn’t mate and have offspring?
The reason we don’t expect griffins or pegassi is that no ancestor of birds was a mammal and no ancestor of mammals was a bird. Only with the ToE do we expect adaptations to stay within a lineage. Mammal features evolved in the mammal lineage after it split away from the common ancestor shared with birds. Bird features evolved in the bird lineage after they split awa from the common ancestor shared with mammals. This tree-like pattern of shared and derived traits is exactly what we would expect from the ToE, and is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the theory. So strong in fact that it was cited by biologists in the 1800’s.
Inheritance dictates shape and form.
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Yawn.
Inheritance dictates nothing.
Inheritance only shows what has happened. it does not say why. or even how.
Richard
Then why do you think offspring resemble their parents?
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And sometimes do not? Or maybe the extent is less obvious? You know the variables involved. Nothing is certain or dictated. There may be parameters but
That is one of the may ways it is suggested that God is involved in Evolution.
Broad stroke assertions are one of the failings that I see in ToE
Richard
I was thinking of more extreme examples, such as a pig giving birth to a dog.
Accurate and precise predictions are one of the strengths I see in the ToE, such as the prediction of the tree-like pattern that predicts we shouldn’t see pegassi or griffins.
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