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Hugh_Farey
Guest
Well, that’s the Catholic Church for you. What version of Christianity do you subscribe to?
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Hugh_Farey
Guest
Fair enough. At least you’ve acknowledged the request.
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Techno2000
Guest
What?..Techno2000:
Given your statement there, I find it interesting you now are asking why God would’ve used evolution and not ex nihilio. In other words, your logic is contradicting.
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Kei
Guest
(Please Note: This uploaded content is no longer available.)
Harrowing to me
Harrowing to me
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Techno2000
Guest
What does it say?
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Aloysium
Guest
How about:
Atoms are bits of information. They have a charge, a mass, a four dimensional location in time and space, and are made up of subatomic particles such as quarks, leptons, bosons and gluons. All these conceptualizations occur within the language of science, through which these realities speak to us and we share among ourselves. It does so because they speak to each other - how the information that defines particular particles causes them to reciprocally affect one another. The equipment which utilizes the inherent properties of matter, extending the capacities of our nervous system to organize the information results in the knowledge possessed by our spirit, that being which brings these others into itself, within the unity of the person-in-the-world.
Everything is relational in nature, a self connection with an other. Atoms and molecules, simple organisms, plants, animals and human beings - a sender/receiver connected by a language to another sender/receiver, nothing exists in isolation but speaks and listens to other things through the language that joins them. Our “language” that which unites our spirits is love.
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LeafByNiggle
Well-known member
If that is what you mean by language, then I guess billiard balls speak to other billiard balls when then hit them and bounce off of them, and the moon speaks to the earth as goes around its gravitationally constrained path. Now you have downgraded the meaning of the word language so that has no chance of implying Intelligent Design. All it means now is “that’s how things are.”LeafByNiggle:
How about:
Atoms are bits of information. They have a charge, a mass, a four dimensional location in time and space, and are made up of subatomic particles such as quarks, leptons, bosons and gluons. All these conceptualizations occur within the language of science, through which these realities speak to us and we share among ourselves. It does so because they speak to each other - how the information that defines particular particles causes them to reciprocally affect one another.
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Aloysium
Guest
You have to open your mind. Billiard balls exist as such and they most definitely communicate when they bounce around. A simple form of language compared to our own, but yet extremely complex. Yes that is how thing are in what might be understood as an eternally infinite Mind. If we try to understand how they got that way from let’s say a singularity, for want of the next cutting edge description, that would require, in view of the fact that we are also creations, something more than a supreme universal identity, and more than a designer - it is God, the same one that brings us into existence here and now, holding us in His love.
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Kei
Guest
I am not sure, but the image reminds me very much of the big bang and gives me a sense of wonder.
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Techno2000
Guest
Yeah… better luck next time.
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mVitus
Guest
I’ll have to agree with Leaf in that you’re very much stretching the idea of communication. When a billiard hits another billiard, energy is transferred but that’s not really any form of communication. It’s a physical reaction.
(While I know it’s not your intention, the way you’re describing your thoughts makes me think of animistic religions where everything, living or not, has a spirit.)
As an anology, communication between billiards makes sense. But when trying to state it as scientific fact, it have a much heavier flavor of philosophy to it than science.
And with your billiards to God thought process, I’d be interested in your expanded thought process. It seems like an interesting discussion.
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mVitus
Guest
In your earlier posts you mentioned how looking at God with human reasoning is faulty, giving as example that’s what huge to us can be tiny to Him. But then you went on to ask why God would’ve use billions of years instead of making everything in one instant. In other words using human reason in a case where what seems huge to us (billions of years) would be tiny to our eternal God.
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Techno2000
Guest
Sorry, I wasn’t clear, I mean things that seem impossible to us, are possible to God.
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benjamin1973
Guest
Is it possible for us to make the Universe, and make chemicals interact in such a way that over billions of years they eventually coalesce, develop into complex chains, and eventually end up typing messages online?
Seems pretty miraculous to me.
Seems pretty miraculous to me.
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rossum
Guest
And vice versa. We humans can learn something new. God is omniscient, so He can never learn anything new as He will already know it. Everything is ‘old news’ to Him.
rossum
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Hugh_Farey
Guest
Splendid. I think I am beginning to find some common ground. I agree with almost all Aloysium has to say about the ‘unity that is a living organism’, and even his ideas about ‘language’, but do not think his ideas conflict with a Christian view of evolution, although ‘original sin’ is a concept which could probably do with more elucidation. It seems to me that our apparent disagreement really lies in the idea of randomness. I do not find that the randomness of natural selection conflicts with divine intention, and suggest that the evidence of the natural world supports randomness as part of the way God directs its progress.
My thoughts go something like this. There are two ways of getting ten “sixes” in a row when throwing a dice. One is simply to keep throwing it until the desired sequence turns up (random evolution), and the other is to weight the dice so that it always falls “six-up” (directed creation). Given the observed huge wastage of natural processes, the failure to reproduce at all of the vast majority of organisms, the extinction of almost every species that ever existed, the universe as we see it looks to me as if randomness is allowed to play a major part, although the desired outcome was both inevitable, and intended, and known, from the beginning.
In common with many creationists, buffalo plumps for the spontaneous creation of a few thousand species, from which all the others developed, but thinks that all these others are no more than ‘permitted’ variations, and that no matter how diverse the decendants, they are not new ‘kinds’.
Furthermore, if previous comments apply, he thinks that the total gene pool of these original organisms has not increased since their original creation, but that all the variety of the descendants is due either to epigenetic changes or genetion deletions. This contention is slightly bizarre, and leads to a fair amount of semantic prestidigitation, in explaining new and different genes as, by some definition, deletions. This could no doubt be explored further.
However, returning to the 5000 orginal species, and their 50 000 000 or so descendant species. This means that each original species has diversified, on average, into ten thousand new species over time, which if creation only happened a few thousand years ago, as previously suggested, is adaptation or variation on a fantastic scale, compared to which the plodding hand of evolution seems positively tame.
Both Techno2000 (“Things that seem impossible to us, are possible to God”) and benjamin1973 (that evolution “seems pretty miraculous to me”) are entirely correct in their assessment of how God has ordained the functioning of his universe. Evolution is both possible and miraculous. And true!
My thoughts go something like this. There are two ways of getting ten “sixes” in a row when throwing a dice. One is simply to keep throwing it until the desired sequence turns up (random evolution), and the other is to weight the dice so that it always falls “six-up” (directed creation). Given the observed huge wastage of natural processes, the failure to reproduce at all of the vast majority of organisms, the extinction of almost every species that ever existed, the universe as we see it looks to me as if randomness is allowed to play a major part, although the desired outcome was both inevitable, and intended, and known, from the beginning.
In common with many creationists, buffalo plumps for the spontaneous creation of a few thousand species, from which all the others developed, but thinks that all these others are no more than ‘permitted’ variations, and that no matter how diverse the decendants, they are not new ‘kinds’.
Furthermore, if previous comments apply, he thinks that the total gene pool of these original organisms has not increased since their original creation, but that all the variety of the descendants is due either to epigenetic changes or genetion deletions. This contention is slightly bizarre, and leads to a fair amount of semantic prestidigitation, in explaining new and different genes as, by some definition, deletions. This could no doubt be explored further.
However, returning to the 5000 orginal species, and their 50 000 000 or so descendant species. This means that each original species has diversified, on average, into ten thousand new species over time, which if creation only happened a few thousand years ago, as previously suggested, is adaptation or variation on a fantastic scale, compared to which the plodding hand of evolution seems positively tame.
Both Techno2000 (“Things that seem impossible to us, are possible to God”) and benjamin1973 (that evolution “seems pretty miraculous to me”) are entirely correct in their assessment of how God has ordained the functioning of his universe. Evolution is both possible and miraculous. And true!
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Techno2000
Guest
Not much of a miracle if atheist believe it.
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mVitus
Guest
I’ve never denied that God has the power to have done a literal 6 days. My argument is that he didn’t, not couldn’t,
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mVitus
Guest
Transubstantiation isn’t much of a miracle to an atheist either. But that doesn’t change that fact it’s special. So if am atheist doesn’t think of creation through evolution as a miracle, that doesn’t mean it isn’t.
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Hugh_Farey
Guest
On the contrary, it’s even more of a miracle if it gets thorough to atheists!
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