Another Big Big Thread of Religious Discussion

[Ben_Fox]

Originally Posted by Serenity

Theistic evolution (less dumb, but still kinda dumb) is the premise that evolution was caused by God. Of course, there are many flaws with this theory. Just to name the three most obvious:
• the human eye is built in a moronic way. The squid's eye, on the other hand, is built quite well, without inadvertantly flipping the image and some other crap.
• 99% of all species that have ever existed on earth are currently extinct. Imagine if an engineer had that failure rate! Remember, God is supposed to be omnipotent, so the failed species being prototypes is stupid.

I'm not sure I follow what you mean by "cause evolution." Do you mean separately design each critter and plunk it down on earth? That doesn't really qualify as 'evolution.' Do you mean that God 'caused evolution' by setting the process of life and, therefore, evolution, into motion? That seems to meet the term better, but it nullifies your flaws, since God simply originates life and "lets nature take its course," as it were.

• It's just adding a "God" term in where it isn't necessary. Occam's razor, anyone? If two equations both yield the same results, the smaller one is probably more accurate.

Question: How did life begin here on Earth?

Science: Conditions that were favorable for the formation of the basic hydrocarbons of life just happened to exist on Earth, with its fortunate position in the "Goldilocks Zone". Earth was potentially 'seeded' by impacts of comets that just happened to be a byproduct of the happily accidental way our solar system was formed. Earth also luckily has a huge moon in relation to its size, a moon that just happens to help stabilize the planet's axis and climate, not to mention protection from a massive gas giant that just happens to help keep the inner solar system relatively impact free for the last couple billion years, making for optimal conditions for the development of life. All of this is possible because, out of the infinite possibilities to choose from, we got a universe where the strong and weak forces just happened to be the right strength to allow nuclear reactions to take place and the force of gravity is luckily not so weak that gas can't coalesce into stars and not so strong that stable, main sequence stars can't form, if any could form at all, and all the members of the particle families just happened to turn out to have the properties that they do. This may be because the hyperdimensional shape formed by up to 7 extra dimensions that are too small for us to detect by any current means coincidentally happens, out of infinite valid selections, to have a shape that gives rise to a universe with the laws of physics as we know them.

Religion: God created the universe, set up the laws it runs by and brought forth life on Earth, ultimately culminating in humankind.

So if I'm going by Ockham's Razor, which should I pick? The one where everything depends on a huge chain of coincidental occurrences that have about the same chance of happening as me hitting every lottery in the world every day for the rest of my life? Or the one where everything happens because a universe designed to produce sentient life is working as intended?