Neither do I but I’m no more certain that there is no intentionality exercised by the cosmos as a whole or by parts other than ourselves. I used to think that consciousness was a byproduct of brains something like our own but I’m less sure of that now. We certainly see purposeful action taken by slime mold and I don’t think they have anything like a brain.
Seems to me that life has no choice but to feed on life. Wild dogs holding a captured gazelle still while their pack devours it alive is unpleasant for an empathetic observer but it is pretty common down the food chain. Older chicks will kill a helpless younger sibling. Maybe it is the reassuring voice of Lorne Green narrating Disney nature films which makes what is natural jarring? But I don’t think there is any reason to attribute creation of atoms and cells to it even if there is something real which underpins the popular belief in the divine. That will always seem like a mistake to me unless the creation in question has to do with making us and our perception of the world possible. I see a slot there for divine creation but anyone who believes in the biblical sort always seems underwhelmed by this suggestion while those who believe the whole notion of the divine is a mistake always think I’m trying to have it both ways.
Except you cant possibly know that. What do ‘natural processes’ mean in relation to the Creator? Personally I tend to think that God designed the mechanisms of evolution, which ultimately led to us humans and the rest of creation, particularly this earth. It is therefore directed in some sense. And remember God is not limited by time, so it’s not as if He didnt know what was going to happen. It wasnt a shock! That’s my tuppence worth.
God, as creator, has determined what can happen in nature, but not necessarily what will happen. So if everybody had gotten vaccinated earlier, we probably wouldn’t be dealing with the omicron variant.
not go extinct. Because we live in a cosmos, not a chaos. Since when does harmony happen by chance.
And Who designed natural laws, just as Who designed moral laws.
Do you think that an intelligent deity makes processes that work on their own in a vacuum, or do they work in conjunction with other processes? I, like Darwin, see evolution as a combination of really two separate processes, namely Variation and Selection, with one guiding the other. What do you say?
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
25
I am certain that intentionality emerges in mesoscopic creatures. Like us. Not slime moulds, wild dogs, gazelles and their purposeless purposes. Or cosmoses or parts thereof. I have no rational warrant to be uncertain about that. Should I?
That probably depends as much on how much certainty you feel you are entitled to and how complete you feel your information is. I don’t know you we’ll enough to say.
Any chance “purposeful” instead of “intentional” would have elicited a different reaction?
As imperfect creations ourselves, are we qualified to assess the quality of God’s Creation?
Lots of people make a related complaint, about the prevalence of suffering and death in the natural world.
To me, as someone who was in awe of the living world for many years even before coming to faith, those complaints are really barking up the wrong tree. Death and suffering serve absolutely crucial creative roles in natural ecosystems. So much goodness - the ongoing creation of new individuals and of new species - depends upon them.
Could we imagine a “living” world without suffering or death? I don’t think so. Death and reproduction are part of our idea of what it is to be living. There are complex, dynamic physical systems that don’t involve death and reproduction. We don’t consider them to be living, or to be awesome in quite the same way that living systems are.
Hmmm, well I see evolution as a process that God (if there is one) created as a natural means to sustain all life without necessarily having to have his hand in it though I suppose he could intervene if he wanted to. At least that is my limited understanding of it though it may not be the correct view on the matter.
I think there is good reason to believe that he is omnitemporal, not that we can get our heads around what that means, especially how it works in terms of our relating to him, especially since we are stuck, so to speak, in sequential time. So is our language, since it is all tensed and time-based. God planned, he foreknew… those past tense verbs do not really apply to God, since he is outside of time (or all through it).
The title question and discussion could also be said of gravity. Why did God make gravity so cruel? So many deaths due to avalanches and mudslides! So much disability and pain due to broken bones! And airplanes must have a special place in judgement when they attempt to escape the grasp of God ordained gravity, which explains why seldom are there survivors of their crashes!
Some things just are, and are neither good nor bad except in our limited minds. We tend to lump things into good and bad depending on our esthetics, and conflate bad and evil,
To me this also relates to the whole “99.99…% of the universe is deadly to us” observation that is apparently supposed to be distressing to people of faith.
Of all the different levels of gravitational potential energy I could be placed at; anything much above +10 or +20 meters or so above ground level will begin to be highly injurious to me, if not fatal. Not to mention if I were to be transplanted to minus x meters of about any amount, I would be materialized in solid rock and have instant death. So of all the many ‘h’ values in U=mgh, 99.99…% of all those possible values are deadly to me. Good thing I’m sitting here now, right at h = 0.5 and not toying with God’s “judgments” by planning any airplane rides! I guess to hear some people tell it, we must be among the first generations to realize what a dangerous world we live in!
To say nothing of how nearly thorough is the atheism you take part in, allowing but one to wear the crown. Repent!
Klax
(The only thing that matters is faith expressed in love.)
34
Where is the intentionality there? Where is the slime mould obviously thinking about what it’s doing? I.e. what about its behaviour requires intentionality? And being purposeful is only a synonym for intentionality in humans and possibly higher animals. So the slime mould is purposeful without being intentional. It engages in remarkably complex, efficient, evolved behaviour to keep doing just that. Purposeless purpose.
I find slime molds fascinating. Obviously, they are following chemical triggers in the environment in some way, and in some ways seem to share a lot of properties with our neurons and nervous system. It makes you wonder at this bag of chemical interactions we call our body.
Kevin, if you know someone or something that could take the place of God, please let
me know.
If one designs a system(s) and implements them, you have your hand in the system like it or not. Of course. God knows if the system is working. We would know if the universe were breaking up.
The point is even though the earth has had many extinctions when one system was changing into another the universe has held up amazingly well until now, when He might have to come back again.
