Is Evolution a form of religion

[St.Roymond]

@JerryN

You are wrong when you generalize on people’s ability to observe. I can quickly and easily switch the image from old hag to beautiful woman, and back, at will, by slight change of point of focus. You are just as wrong when you accuse all scientists of bias when you have no evidence whatsoever.

I just tilt my head a bit and see both at once.

@JerryN

@RichardG

The two are mutually exclusive.

I think we have finally gotten Richard to explicitly state the real point of dissension! And then it becomes evident that his position is wrong, by demonstration! The point that God has made, by the way He created this earth, whenever He created it, is that He has put in sufficient evidence into His creation so that there is no absolute objective proof that He had to be intervening in the process after the first formation of life. God either put or allowed the evidence to be present; God either set the world into such perfectly orchestrated motion that He didn’t have to intervene again to make every single thing develop exactly as He wanted, or He did actually intervene in extremely subtle ways, without leaving objective evidence of His intervention. As you said, @RichardG, there is no proof either way.

I think it was this thread where I pointed out that God could achieve desired mutations in ways that scientists could see happening but never recognize God at work. I used cosmic rays as an example, but radioactive decay works as well, as do tunneling electrons; all God has to do is make a particle that was going to move by take a trajectory so as to strike some DNA just right, and He has done His work (once again) in hiding. Scientists would never recognize the divine at work because there is no way to predict such particle trajectories, and the result of that is that God at work is hidden right in plain sight!
That itself makes evolution astounding; it’s one thing to design a system so elegant as to keep bringing forth life, another still to arrange the workings of that system so that the Designer could step in and intervene without ever being detected.
That’s why no single thing ever tipped the views of my fellow students in our informal intelligent design club; individual events only point to the Designer in aggregate, in how they interact – it’s the system design that is supremely elegant enough that for some at least it practically screams, “This was designed!”

@JerryN

I really wish you (@RichardG) would give me the benefit of a doubt, and admit that God did what God thought was best, and there is no way we can prove exactly how God created this world,

I wish Richard would put in the effort to actually understand evolution and see that it is a system more sublime than anything in cosmology, such that if the heavens declare the glory of God then DNA and mutations and inheritance do so even more!