Hi ChrisB. Thanks for this patient reply. Much appreciated.
Which is why I put it at the level "Things that could be better thought-out **even by a human level of intelligence.**"
Not the subtle or arguable stuff. Obvious.
The human eye's my professional speciality, and that has blatant design flaws, and far better eyes (sharper vision, healthier construction) can be found in the animal kingdom.
Christianity teaches that, after Jesus returns the saints (i.e. Jesus' followers) will be given new bodies. It's not clear what these new bodies will look like, but it's almost certain they will be superior in every way to these mortal bodies we now have.
This suggests that God definitely can create better bodies. And if that is the case, then why do we have these lesser bodies now? As I suggested earlier, this life is temporary and there are plenty of indications that what we're experiencing now is a testing ground to determine what kind of spiritual creatures we will become as a result of our choices.
We have bodies which easily break and experience pain. Sometimes that pain in inflicted on us by others, sometimes by ourselves, and sometimes through the environment around us. Sometimes it is other people who experience pain. How do we react in each of these scenarios? We've been thrown into a situation where we must struggle to learn and grow.
These arguments about how God could not exist because we he's not given us everything we believe we deserve misses the point of learning character, integrity, faithfulness, and loyalty with what we've been given. It is similar to a child who complains about getting a new bicycle when his parents could have given him a motorcycle or rookie cop on traffic duty who complains that he's not been made detective already so that he can solve all the big cases or any number of other such examples of people who feel they should be given more than what they either deserve or can handle at the time.
That's fair, but does the forum of itself produce offspring subject to variation and natural selection?
If not, it's not sitting under the umbrella of evolutionary theory anyway.
The way forums and websites appear, evolve and go extinct is not utterly dissimilar, but it's not very useful as a comparison to life and reproduction and natural selection based evolution.
The forum analogy showed that the forum does not lack intelligence just because it is not as good as someone can imagine it to be, which was the argument dogmahunter made about the limitations of our human bodies as compared to what he could imagine them to be.
Evolution is messy and uncaring. The casualty rate is irrelevant as long as those better equipped to survive and reproduce emerge.
Coming at this from totally the opposite side of some here, I however agree with them that Theistic Evolution is a horrid hybrid. It produces some bizarre ideas, in the detail, so as a convenient bridge between science and theology I'd hold that it works... if you don't look at it too much, or too closely.
Evolution is neither caring nor uncaring. "Uncaring" is teleological language. You have to be able to care in the first place in order to not care. There would be no point is saying, "This glass of milk doesn't care about me" since the glass of milk isn't able to care in the first place.
Regarding bizarre ideas, people often have a very different understanding of what is or isn't bizarre, what is or isn't good/bad, what is or isn't worth living for /not worth living for etc, which makes sense to some degree. It's not that we can't understand God's position, but that we must learn to understand, just as children must learn to understand the wiser ways of their parents. When they are young they don't like the taste of vegetables. They become stubborn about an issue which they do not understand, but from their own personal perspective they are convinced of how right they are.
As for theistic evolution, I'm still not convinced. While I think there is certainly much to be interested regarding the method of how God made life, to me the method (whether it was literal 7 days or over millions of years) matters very little to the fact that he did it, and that he did it for reasons.
As an account of how reality is, the proffered doctrine of "the Fall" to cover the difference from a past utopia to humanity's current lot... no, not impossible, but a definite "fix" and an easy to maintain one given its flexibility and adaptability.
Convenient it is.
I don't see how it is convenient in the sense of "fixing" anything. I'm probably still not understanding your point here. "The Fall" isn't that difficult; it was the first example of humans exercising their free will to go against their creator. A lot of emphasis is put on Adam, but it's almost certain that any human would have eventually exercised such a decision.
It's not clear to me how God creates a free-will spirit before putting it into a human body and how that plays out regarding free will. It seems, via examples throughout the OT and NT that some people exhibit a more "natural" inclination toward sincerity and obedience than others. I think every spirit is dynamic in it's own way but still subject to the same free-will standards of choice-making. Perhaps God has some kind of random spirit generator to create the soul and then once it's put into a body it comes alive and is able to start learning and growing in response to the world around it.
Anyway, Adam had a few commands which he successfully followed before he finally lost it at the tree. I'm not sure how literal the whole snake scene is but the important lesson I take from it is that it was the first case (that we know of) where God upped the stakes for his new creation by introducing them to a new challenge; outside influence. They obeyed well enough when it was just God there influencing them, but what about an entity that was not in favor of loyalty to God? As the story indicates, they didn't pass this part of their training. As a result a new set of consequences came into effect catering for disobedience eventually leading to obedience via learning and growing.
Over the past several thousand years we've come a long way from those first simple commands in the garden. We now experience a vast network or morally based decision making. Jesus was the ultimate Revelation of God's desire to have something more with humanity than just "I know better than you so just do what I tell you" into something more like us saying, "We no longer follow you because you tell us to, but because we genuinely believe your way is better".
So yeah, "the fall" isn't just some theological argument for assigning blame. It's part of a long history of our growing interaction with God.
It is? I think it's weird, and something that only arises rather as Sherlock Holmes puts it "when everything else has been eliminated.
A variety of odd things in science have appeared and demanded consideration when more "sensible" answers simply would not fit the data, the observations and experiments. Such can be the unsettling moments of great progress, delivering a verdict of "the answers we've got aren't good enough." A need to look again, to look harder and to reconsider the nice, settled "well that's impossible".
I'm not sure that I would disagree with any of this except the opening question regarding the convenience of believing that something came from nothing. Yeah, I do think it is rather convenient to have such a belief. My own position is that everything came from the creator. To believe that everything came from nothing is convenient in that it rather casually glosses over whatever accountability may be expected of us from the being who created us.
I think it is very sensible to consider that there could be an intelligence/power out there greater than that of humanity who organized not only the universe but our own lives. From my experience, it is only pride which causes us to think such a conclusion to be ridiculous. As Hume argued regarding the watchmaker analogy, the analogy fails because humans have experience with watch making but we do not have experience with world-making. In other words, despite the complexity being far greater than what humans can achieve, humans will still believe it is not intelligent design simply because they themselves are not able to do it.
