But all the evidence from the Earth and sky says He did – that evolution is the correct understanding of the origin of the species. This is what the majority of scientists and Christians listen to. There is only a small group of people trying to convince people to ignore the evidence and call God a liar. It is no different than the flat earth groups trying to convince people that the world is flat despite God showing us all that the Earth is not flat.
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I really do not understand the have your cake and eat it too position that evolution does not entail abiogenesis. Of course it does. Which does not entail that God does not contain eternal infinite nature. To suggest that God has to initiate life on the trillions of worlds in this insignificant universe of infinite, but that He can then leave it to get on by itself, is unsound. Absurd. Is just a point on the ID continuum. What other gaps are there, that He might fill? We don’t yet and will never yet know why matter omms in the keys of c, e, G and h so God-done-it? There are no gaps whatsoever. There is no lack in nature. There is our existential, evolved yearning, that reaches but cannot grasp God in Christ.
When will faith ever be humble? Like God?
Why? The theory of evolution only applies at the population level to living things that reproduce and asserts that the allele frequencies in populations of (already living) species change over time as the population adapts to a specific ecological niche. Might someone who accepts it be inclined to wonder where the first life came from? Sure, but that doesn’t mean there is a logical entailment from the definition of the evolutionary model that I just gave that “therefore abiogenesis.”
I don’t believe this and neither do most Christians I know who accept evolution. That’s Deism, not the God of the Bible. The God of the Bible sustains creation in an ongoing way, is intimately involved in the lives and destinies of his creatures, and has a telos for the cosmos which is unfolding according to his divine plan and with his ongoing interaction and responsiveness to the free will he has given creatures. Science doesn’t describe God’s interaction with creation because the tools of science cannot investigate supernatural agency. Scientific knowledge is not the only or the most superior form of knowledge. We have other tools for acquiring knowledge about God.
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doesn’t science tell us that we don’t have free will?
Not that I am aware of. Pretending that all our choices can be chalked up to inevitable chemical reactions and a deterministic evolutionary drive to survive is reductionistic and not something that has been definitively established.
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This would apply:
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Assuming God is real, because of the proposition that Jesus was He incarnate, the God of the Bible is 99.9…% a God we made and continuously piously make up, progressively with His connivance. Of course He sustains, ‘thinks’ creation. Period. Always has from eternity. Always will. He has a telos beyond nature and that is nature’s telos. It manifests not even that. If there is supernature, nature is its seed bed. God is not in the slightest bit theistic, bar in and around incarnating in it, in nature, apart from grounding it from eternity. He is theistic beyond nature and as nature. His ‘intervention’ is in that there would be no nature if He didn’t. And as creatures. One per sapient species. Belief cannot change the reality, if any, of that. Metaphor can’t change it. Beyond nature He wills transcendent creation. As ever. God’s interaction with creation is by the Spirit, in instantiating and sustaining it, in incarnating in it, instantiating the Church, and yearning along with it. As in the rest of nature, nothing about human behaviour needs explaining by divine intervention. I am not aware of any other tools for acquiring knowledge about God than the minority reason He invites us to use and the overwhelming majority of subjective emotion of our natures. And yeah, as Alexey says, what on Earth is free will? All a bit Cartesian isn’t it?
Forgive me, what is to say that your description of God is not a pious fiction? I mean no offence, it is a genuine question.
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Nothing. And what’s to forgive Liam? Darn good question I shoulda seen comin’. Guilty as charged I reckon. But minimally so. My pious fiction ignores all other fiction. All the he said, she said. It just deals with one pious proposition and its rational consequences.
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Fair enough. At least you are honest about it 
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I don’t know anybody here who isn’t!
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Are you serious?
ever considered the outcome of the process and what it has lead to? If you play a game involving dice which involves a rule, is the outcome random or is the outcome controled by the rule? you might consider the chances of the players to be fair by the randomisation of the input variables, but the outcome of the game is governed by strategy as in knowing better which dice to retain over multiple throws.
If you have not yet worked out the purpose of the process given the observed outcome it has lead towards and considering the way the feedback loop works I can’t really help you
strategy, would you call the outcome random of are there players who win this by applying strategy?
It’s you who isn’t serious. The outcome of a non-behavioural process is not its purpose. Rivers don’t flow to make the sea salty. Hydrogen doesn’t fuse in the sun to make the sun shine. I don’t need the ‘help’ you’re utterly failing to provide, apart from to make my point even starker. And the dice game, like life, isn’t either or. There is no strategy in evolution.
So it’s a good thing that believers don’t try to locate it there. Rather, we find purpose in the mind/will of God.
Bingo! Most believers, Klax, assume that God is real - and for us that means God isn’t just something we made up (though we can certainly wrongly make up stuff about God). We also live as if (and thoroughly believe) that we have choice and agency granted us by our very real God. Your continuous denial of that notwithstanding; as if such a thing must be proven on your terms before its existence can be accepted. Besides, asking for it to be shown or demonstrated or “defined” for you is like asking for a square circle. If we could fully encompass it for complete analysis and delivery to you as some packaged good for your inspection, then we would have disproven its existence. Think what you want of the convenience of believing in something that disappears the moment you try to stare directly at it. But belief is not one whit disturbed by the acknowledgment that freewill will not do something, that - if it did - would cause it to fail to be itself.
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Yep, I know it well.
You can’t avoid the honesty can you : )
Sorry, my denial of what? I agree with everything you’re saying so far. I don’t deny what you believe, what you assume, what meanings you ascribe,
What thing? That what you believe, assume, your meanings about reality? I don’t deny any of those. The subjective is as real as it gets.
And now, here, your logic disappears in a puff of rhetoric, like Lewis’. I’m not aware of asking you anything. Have I forgotten?
I’m sorry mate, this gets weirder and weirder. What’s freewill again? All incredibly subjective this isn’t it? Untransferable too. I’m sure it’s all meaningful for you. But it doesn’t correspond with my thinking in the slightest.
Well - I guess chalk it all up to me misunderstanding you then!
It’s just that when people respond to discussions about things like free will, and your response includes phrases like “What free will?” - most listeners of ordinary English would understand that to mean you are skeptical that they have anything of the sort. Sort of like if somebody speaks to me of all their money, and I ask “what money?” - if they want me to believe they are wealthy, they might then feel obliged to “demonstrate their holdings” to me. But I’m glad I misunderstand you in all this, and that you apparently then are quite satisfied to cavort along with all the rest of us believers here who make real choices in life, and try to live in faithful relationship to a real God whose existence transcends our own.
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I have no idea what free will is. Does God have it? Can you give me an example of a believer’s real choice?
And you really can’t resist proving my point for me, can you! 
But no. I’m not gonna take that bait any more. You can feign ignorance about the broad sweep of what somebody means with the phrase “free will”, but I have no share in your doubts on that front, nor any need to attempt satisfying you with impossible definitions of it. Good luck with all that.
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Based on the responses so far, I think you might be setting up a false dichotomy which says that either God created the universe, life, and intelligence, or that evolution did and God at most just wound up the the mechanism that led to the world as we see it today and then walked away. I believe that God is always creating and working in the world. Sometimes he does it through ways we understand. That is what we call science. Sometimes he does it through ways we do not yet understand. That is what we call miracles. I do not think that miracles are violations of natural law as much as God operating through nature in ways that we are not yet able to because we do not understand the universe the way that God does. I do not claim to know how God works in the world, but that is my understanding based on scripture and the broader Christian tradition.
The way that I would evade the logic that God tried to hide his role in the creation of the universe is to say that God did not hide his role at all. He simply did not create it in the way that we might have expected a deity to create.
The quintessential quality of being human is being capable of making morally significant choices. The most essential one is whether to accept (Christ) God on his terms.