I don’t think you realize that you are the one creating ad hoc excuses in response to obvious questions. But we both agree concerning where the questions lie. And the questions are not going anywhere. All the ad hoc excuses in the world do not erase the original questions.
An omniscient omnipotent good God need not have built aggression competition, pain, death and extinction, right into his system of “creation.” That is like building in obsolescence and sin. Also consider that you admit such a God can indeed create a place that involves none of those things, i.e., heaven. But let me point out yet more obvious questions…
Consider the “anger reaction,” aggressive outbursts that we all lapse into from time to time. Those are to be expected evolutionarily speaking, because our threat system has evolved so that it is activated rapidly, because defenses that come on too slowly may be too late. We have been prey more than predators, even for most of human evolutionary prehistory, and there isnʼt much time to react when the tiger is about to pounce, or a fellow primate is coming at us to keep us away from his food, or his mate, or even his harem in case of Pan chimpanzees (though Bonobos are certainly different in not having harems, and having sex freely with other chimps). Is having a rapid-response amygdala for threat response our “sinful” fault; or is it part of the way our brains evolved to function?
Christian apologists object that such a biological interpretation tends to reduce sin or evil merely to our acting on long evolved biological impulses, ignoring forms of evil made possible by our transcendence—evils such as idolatry of self, viewing other people as mere objects, and the like. But such traits could just as well be explained as being rooted in our survival instincts. As the anatomist and Christian Daryl Domning admits, our “sinful” human behaviors do appear to exist because they promote the survival and reproduction of those individuals that perform(ed) them. He adds that “there is virtually no known human behavior that we call ‘sin’ that is not also found among nonhuman animals. Even pride, proverbially the deadliest sin of all, is not absent.” Domningʼs “conclusion” is that animals are “doing things that would be sinful if done by morally reflective human beings.” Moreover… “Logical parsimony and the formal methods of inference used in modern studies of biological diversity affirm that these patterns of behavior are displayed in common by humans and other animals because they have been inherited from a common ancestor which also possessed them. In biologistsʼ jargon, these behaviors are homologous. Needless to say, this common ancestor long predated the first humans and cannot be identified with the biblical Adam.”
Or to quote Sally Carrighar, “A preacher thundering from his pulpit about the uniqueness of human beings with their God-given souls would not like to realize that his very gestures, the hairs that rose on his neck, the deepened tones of his outraged voice, and the perspiration that probably ran down his skin under clerical vestments are all manifestations of anger in mammals. If he was sneering at Darwin a bit (one does not need a mirror to know that one sneers), did he remember uncomfortably that a sneer is derived from an animalʼs lifting its lip to remind an enemy of its fangs? Even while he was denying the principle of evolution, how could a vehement man doubt such intimate evidence?”
Many Protestant and Catholic theistic evolutionists believe that at some point a soul appeared in two (or more) of our animal ancestors. One of these, or perhaps their representative, was assigned the name “Adam.” These ensouled humans were spiritual orphans, apparently. Their parents would have looked and acted much like them, with only a handful of DNA mutations distinguishing them, biologically, but these first ensouled humans would have suckled at the breasts of a soulless mother, and picked up their first lessons on how to behave by observing and interacting with soulless parents and friends. Does such a view make much sense?
And having acquired a “soul” that, according to Christian theology, now needed to be “saved,” what kind of salvation was available to our ancient ancestors who first chipped stones, carved spears, built fires, and later drew pictures of animals on the walls of caves in France? They seemed pretty involved in simply staying alive and noticing animal life, perhaps practicing some sort of religion involving the recognition of animal spirits. Which reminds me that besides the cave paintings from long ago, the oldest known human-made religious structure was built about 12,000 years ago, and is decorated with graven images of animals which would be prohibited by Exodus 20:4 thousands of years later. Early human artists also left behind carved images of large breasted women. No doubt the folks who pursued the healthiest women that could also keep their man warm at night, not necessarily the most “sinless” women, gave birth to the most offspring, leading to our species with its genes and behaviors.
“Are we really so splendid as to justify such a long prologue?.. If I were granted omnipotence, and millions of years to experiment in, I should not think Man much to boast of as the final result of all my efforts.”
—Bertrand Russell, “Cosmic Purpose” in his book Religion and Science
“Suppose that upon some island we should find a man a million years of age, and suppose we found him living in an elegant mansion, and he should inform us that he lived in that house for five hundred thousand years before he thought of putting on a roof, and that he but recently invented windows and doors; would we say that from the beginning he had been an infinitely accomplished and scientific architect?”
—Robert Ingersoll
Knowing the remarkable varieties of species that arose over hundreds of millions of years prior to humanityʼs last minute arrival on the scene, it seems less than spectacularly wise or beneficent to design a cosmos that destroys the majority of them, sometimes slowly, sometimes in vast catastrophes. Like knocking over a game table. What kind of a “game plan” is that? While humanity puzzles over their bones?
“The present surviving species of human has been here over 100 thousand years. That it took billions of years to prepare the world for him is proof that that is what it was done for. I suppose it is. I dunno. If the Eiffel tower were now representing the worldʼs age, the skin of paint on the pinnacle-knob at its summit would represent humanity’s share of that age; and anybody would perceive that that skin was what the tower was built for. I reckon they would, I dunno.”
—Mark Twain
If our species lasts for 130 million years like the dinosaurs, weʼll be lucky, and if we survive that long, what will human beings look like by then? Maybe weʼll have added genetic features via bioengineering? Or weʼll build silicon brains or hybrid silicone/bio brains that keep track of far more knowledge. Or, some species that ours has helped create (robotic, or bio-engineered species) will replace humanity? Or some meteors, cosmic rays, solar flares, passing star, black hole or nearby nova will extinguish life on earth and some other civilized race traveling through our solar system will merely cite “the story of life on earth” as an object lesson concerning the dangers inherent in the cosmos? The cosmos has not even reached its maximum number of stars and planets yet, and we know stars are capable of burning for billions more years. So one can easily imagine a cosmos empty of our species for as long or longer than it was prior to our evolution.
“It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only.”
—Hoyle, 1964
What if evidence of simple living organisms are found elsewhere in our solar system or beyond it? Such simple organisms elsewhere in the cosmos don’t need to exist at all, theologically speaking, per the earth-centered allegory in Genesis.
There are too many questions inherent in living in a cosmos that seems at best merely in equilibrium with life/death, evolution/extinction. Positing an omnipotent, omniscient, all-good God seems like one might be overshooting possible explanations based on the above observations of natural history. And trying to reconcile such a cosmos (and prehistoric human history) with a belief in one true religion (or be damned, as most orthodox sects teach) seems questionable.