And then there is God’s providence.
Whatever could have happened would have been. It explains nothing at all.
Que sera, sera. How do you say “…and God is impotent” in French? How about “omnitemporal”?
It explains everything.
If the meteor had hit a different spot on the Earth the dinosaurs may not have gone extinct. The massive crude oil and limestone deposits in what is now the Gulf of Mexico may have made the impact even worse.
What would it have taken to change the path of the meteor by just a little bit? Imagine a tiny, tiny change in the interactions that kicked the meteor out of the Kuiper belt or Oort cloud, that’s all it would have taken for the dinosaurs to possibly survive, and for mammals not to flourish.
Fascinating. A couple of hours either way rotationally.
Timing. Placing. Do you detect a theme here.
I think you are avoiding the question posed by the fine tuning argument.
I question that.
Not in the slightest, no. Why would I? How could any rational person, including those of faith?
The theme that I have so subtly been proclaiming all this time and cleverly nuanced that I thought you might have picked up on by now is that God in his providence is sovereign over time and place, timing and placing.
Many of faith believe that (do you recall hearing of Maggie or George?), but most of us are not as rational as you, since you believe God is impotent to act interventionally.
There’s nothing clever or subtle in the thought of God committing geocide and micromanaging(=fine tuning) some arbitrary love child while watching others hang and burn. As in Arthur C. Clarke’s terribly beautiful short The Star.
Do straw men and red herrings come any bigger?
A Father caring for his children is micromanaging. Whatever.
Does irrelevance? Irrationality?
Speaking of relevance, I bet you didn’t see or didn’t read the Bonhoeffer I posted, or perceive it as applicable to you. Just in case, here it is again:
First of all I will confess quite simply – I believe that the Bible alone is the answer to all our questions, and that we need only to ask repeatedly and a little humbly, in order to receive this answer. One cannot simply read the Bible like other books. One must be prepared really to enquire of it. Only thus will it reveal itself. Only if we expect from it the ultimate answer, shall we receive it. That is because in the Bible God speaks to us. And one cannot simply think about God in one’s own strength, one has to enquire of him. Only if we seek him, will he answer us. Of course it is also possible to read the Bible like any other book, that is to say from the point of view of textual criticism, etc.; there is nothing to be said against that. Only that that is not the method which will reveal to us the heart of the Bible, but only the surface, just as we do not grasp the words of someone we love by taking them to bits, but by simply receiving them, so that for days they go on lingering in our minds, simply because they are the words of a person we love; and just as these words reveal more and more of the person who said them as we go on, like Mary, “pondering them in our heart,” so it will be with the words of the Bible. Only if we will venture to enter into the words of the Bible, as though in them this God were speaking to us who loves us and does not will to leave us along with our questions, only so shall we learn to rejoice in the Bible…
If it is I who determine where God is to be found, then I shall always find a God who corresponds to me in some way, who is obliging, who is connected with my own nature. But if God determines where he is to be found, then it will be in a place which is not immediately pleasing to my nature and which is not at all congenial to me. This place is the Cross of Christ. And whoever would find him must go to the foot of the Cross, as the Sermon on the Mount commands. This is not according to our nature at all, it is entirely contrary to it. But this is the message of the Bible, not only in the New but also in the Old Testament…
And I would like to tell you now quite personally: since I have learnt to read the Bible in this way – and this has not been for so very long – it becomes every day more wonderful to me. I read it in the morning and the evening, often during the day as well, and every day I consider a text which I have chosen for the whole week, and try to sink deeply into it, so as really to hear what it is saying. I know that without this I could not live properly any longer.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
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Arthur C. Clarke’s… short The Star
I read it. You should not let fiction determine your worldview.
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terribly beautiful
To a nihilist, maybe.
On the question of whether things would turn out the same evolutionary, opinions reflect the opiner’s inclinations to determinism or indeterminism rather than conclusive evidence. Evolution has both some highly unpredictable aspects and some tightly constrained aspects. Another challenge is what do we mean by things coming out the same? For example, if a rewind of evolution produced somewhat human-like, spiritual beings descended from cephalopods, is that basically the same result or not? Simon Conway Morris emphasizes the similarities. Roger D. K. Thomas and students have done analyses showing that most of the imaginable body plans had been exploited by end of the Cambrian, suggesting that most of the options have been taken and another version of evolution would turn out broadly similar. Gould emphasized the variation of the Cambrian forms - arthropods show combinations of appendages in ways that are not found in any of the major arthropod groups present for the rest of the Phanerozoic (how many antennae, limbs, mouthparts, etc.) But the average non-biologist might easily dismiss them as a bunch of bugs and shrimp, whereas no one has trouble telling a butterfly from a standard beetle from an ant, which are all holometabolous insects. Which disparity is more impressive?
Perhaps I have not been clear - fine tuning as it is discussed deals with events from a beginning, such as formation of stars, elements and subsequent events (molecules, planets etc). These are shown to be critically dependent on scientific calculations, and thus the use of the unfortunate ‘fine tuning’ phrase. The various discussions on biological evolution are relevant after the formation of stars, planets, molecules etc. and are thus not the basis for a repeat of the creation.
My point has been that if the conditions covered by ‘fine tuning’ differed, science shows that nothing would be as it is. Critics have brushed this aside by denying a beginning, denying scientific constants, and so on, without producing any substantial scientific data.
Discussions on evolution would be mute, since under different conditions, elements and molecules as we know, could not form.
Which conditions?
A detailed discussion and views for and against this notion can be found in places such as:
I’m fully conversant with the myth of fine tuning. Nature self tunes a few, a polydactylic handful of measured constants which cannot vary but will derive from the intersections of the prevenient laws nonetheless. If God is the ground of being, He still may not have to omm them.