But you still have to concede that what they used in the experiments is still only
what they think the “primordial soup” consisted of. Nobody knows for sure, because nobody has any samples from the time. It is, at best, an educated guess.
Now, I’ll be perfectly honest – I don’t know what kickstarted life as we know it. I think, however, that answering ‘God’ is only extending the problem, pushing it back one step further – but let’s not get into that.
You can get into a “chain of mirrors” aspect with any of these debates…take it all the way back to the “primordial soup”, and that’s dandy, but where did the primary elements come from? “Gas and dust as it coalesced in space.” Fine. Where did the gas and dust come from? “Leftover materials from the Big Bang.” Okay. What caused the Big Bang? “We don’t know.” Ah.
What it boils down to is no matter which way you look at it, there’s always
something that was always “just there” to start all this stuff in motion. Science usually gives it some name like “Primary elementary particles” or some such; Christians usually refer to it as Deity.
I do not think that it’s a stretch or wrong for a theist to point to evolution and say ‘this is the best explanation we have for how God did it’. After all, we’re talking about an omnipotent being
I agree. He could very well have done it that way, even with the inherent problems in Darwinian theory. And there’s nothing to stop any Christian from accepting that viewpoint. But there’s also an equally legitimate viewpoint which looks at the whole rig with a healthy dose of skepticism, for religious, philosophical, and yes, even
scientific reasons.
sure, God could’ve created the earth with fake dinosaur bones buried beneath the surface, but I can’t for the life of me think of why a deity with a reputation as a straight man rather than a practical joker would do such a thing.
Now it’s
my turn to engage in some speculation. Who’s to say that God didn’t create an entire creation, which, for whatever reason, He later allowed to be destroyed by whatever cataclysm you choose, and then built a new one on top of the ruins of the old? This would fit in with the theory of “mass extinctions” every so often ( Ordovician, Devonian, Permian, Triassic, Cretaceous, and at the present time, Quaternary, as I recall), and would likewise explain why we dig these bones up that obviously did once belong to living creatures.
However, we also don’t know what the atmospheric conditions were like during these previous “creations”, any more than we really know what the “primordial soup” consisted of. Maybe there was more nitrogen in the air; maybe there was more atmospheric pressure; maybe there was a permanant overcast and less solar radiation. Nobody knows. Maybe God re-configured the whole works to accomodate mankind when He decided to create man.
And then later on, we dig this stuff up and conclude that it’s part of the creation we now presently occupy, never recognizing that what we’re finding had nothing to do with what we’re now living in, and in our error, we extrapolate backwards the present conditions and assume it was always similar to the way it is now.
(shrug) Just speculation. Sort of like primordial soup.
It’s no belittling of omnipotence to think God played by the rules he created in the development of life. And it does not conflict with the idea of human ensoulment – again, omnipotence to the rescue! Maybe he saw a couple of apes and decided to kick them into being something more.
Maybe. Or maybe those “hominid species” are nothing more than extinct species of ape that had nothing to do with humans.
VociMike, thanks for being the voice of sanity in this thread. Though I’d certainly love to find out what T. Rex’s white meat tastes like
You’d be better off eating Apaotosaurus…we have always traditionally stuck to consuming plant-eaters (cows, swine, mammoths) instead of predators (wolves, lions, tigers).
