How to explain the changes between two steps in the way of the human eye?

What caricature of how many of over a billion Christians’ Gods? And over a billion Muslims’ Gods? Who of the billions is not damnationist? Not sexist? Or not homophobic? Or not theocratic? Theocapitalist? Exceptionalist? Placist? You’re not, you don’t believe those caricatures believed by billions, these adventures in missing the point. Dawkins isn’t interested in those who have a caricature of God finding his pointing out their naked emperor abhorrent. Where does he ever caricature your God and mine?

When he calls him a nasty, brutish, murderous monster … or words to that effect (which may not be your god or mine … but Dawkins denies your or my trying to split any hairs about it - if you call yourself a Christian, he has insisted that this is what your god is.)

Facts, truth, science, rationality are not touched by faith Jonatas. There is no filter, no lens for nature but the senses, sharpened by science. Faith can’t change what is. Nature is completely free, autonomous. If God guided it, it would be obvious.

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Welcome!

Don’t mind Klax. I sent you a PM.

Klax   The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.

What was that faith in, exactly?

 

I’m sorry you have never experienced God’s providence, at least not that you are aware of or are willing to admit.

God is sovereign over mutations in DNA, and providentially intervenes, not that science can detect it, of course.

Here’s a little illustration: Nephrectomy. Another example of how God is sovereign without breaking any natural laws (making his activity scientifically undetectable) is Maggie’s testimony.

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I also agree with Klax that science has nothing to do with my faith. I don’t think there is any scientific reason to believe in God. I definitely don’t believe in there being any scientific evidence to believe that evolution lacked the free will of animals and chance. I don’t think God caused a meteor to hit earth to help bring about conditions that makes earth better for mammals or that he made mammals body temperature less favorable for fungal infections and so on. Why would I think God helped evolve mankind from primates in the trees into bipedal hunters so that we could prey on animals to potentially have more nutrition to help with brain development and so on.

If someone believes science shows that God guided human evolution then they need to back it up. They need to show what specifically evolved. Consciousness? Self awareness? Larger brains? Then show why natural selection does not better answer it.

It’s a form of concordism and intelligent design. It would be like saying humans ears evolved so we could hear the gospel being preached. It’s just silly.

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I experience it all the time just like everybody else, not sorry to admit that, so you have nothing to be sorry for. If I experience a theophany, you’ll be the first to know.

You misconstrue and/or are being disengenuous. You know what I mean when I talk about God’s intervening providence, not general providence. There’s a Wikipedia article on it, if you’re confused.
 

No, you will.

How could I possibly be confused? I know of no possible providence apart from general, predicated on God being the ground of being. Neither does anyone else without any rational exception. Nothing that breaks any natural, statistical surface whatsoever. Not counting the first couple of circles around our Earth local incarnation.

Only if He is. For most, the vast majority here, He is. He cannot possibly insist that my and your God is. People have some very strange ideas about Richard that they can never substantiate. It’s as if they’ve never read him.

such as?
[as far as the 'nasty, brutish, etc. ’ he was the one that said words to that effect. I’m not sure what there is to misconstrue about it.]

But contrary to what is sometimes thought I do believe in the supernatural. Just a very limited aspect of it. Since I believe satan is already dead I no longer believe that he can preform the supernatural and so things like witchcraft does not exist.

Since I believe that only the apostles had the ability to lay on hands passing a spiritual gift, but they they are too dead I no longer believe in miracles being done by the finger tip. I don’t believe we can just pick up any venomous snake and be fine but that we will probably be bitten and have to go to the hospital. I don’t believe our shadows can pass over people and heal them.

What I do believe in is that the Holy Spirit is a active power and that it affects us in a way beyond what science can detect. It becomes obvious by our fruits as they change as we try to become more Christ like. I believe that prayers can be answered. But most of those prayers being answered can also be explained through naturalistic processes. Such as the money you found to pay your bills that you prayed for came from someone else’s misfortune most likely. That organ you need to live that y’all keep praying for comes when some healthy young man dies leaving behind a family.

I believe that every decade as you repeatedly pray “ dear god protect my family and keep them all safe and my friends and pets too” you’ll continually lose friends, family, snd pets and fall back on well in restoration we will be together and god did keep them safe, he kept their soul safe despite you obviously meaning some sort of immortality where no one dies physically.

What I don’t believe in is that there is any scientific evidence to support God manipulating time, space and free will to bring about global extinctions resulting in a environment that just happens to favor some small squirrel like creature that over times has descendants that becomes monkeys, primates and humans.

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That should be in the Humor thread, but you don’t show up much there.
 

Yes, I agree that you are unknowledgeable, even when you know about Maggie and George. God’s special providence is all through the Bible, too, and countless other lives in the last two millennia, including mine, so you have no excuse.
 

There is a big difference between being irrational and allowing God to be inscrutable and omnitemporal. Your concept of an impotent God is… severely lacking.
 

You would be one who cannot figure out that the game is rigged when someone wins five lotteries in a day, and then someone else does the next day. Q.v. Maggie and George.

@Dale and @Klax, this is getting like Groundhog Day gentlemen but without Bill Murray. Can I kindly ask that either you get back to the OP’s topic or you take your discussion to the PMs? Thanks

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Such as He somehow misrepresents the bizarre, incoherent folk beliefs of virtually all believers. Especially Christians. The vast majority of whom justify the “The God of the Old Testament [who] is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.” superficially ‘redeemed’ in the New. Nowhere does Richard say He’s short. Richard fully acknowledges the rare, privileged liberal few, like his friends the bishops of Oxford and Edinburgh, like you and your list and me, who don’t believe the fiction. Who aren’t damnationist. Who take the premiss of God only revealed in Christ.

Again, where is Richard wrong in his scientific critique?

I guess I don’t see the masochistic part of god being a sadomasochistic being in the Old Testament.

That’s actually just a jest. I do agree that many miss the clear fictional aspects of the hyperbolic war language in the Bible.

[I changed my response to Klax here to a private message … since it is off topic.]

Biblically, God is at work in all that happens. Exactly how is not spelled out, but the basic principle applied to the present question is that science is an attempt to describe the physical processes that God uses in the ordinary running of the universe. If creation of eyes entirely used evolutionary processes (which seems quite likely), that does not change the principle that God created them and we can praise Him for that. It merely tells us something of how.

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Shall we talk about God’s providential interventions that break no natural laws and that science cannot detect. :slightly_smiling_face: