It's actually a combination of natural selection and genetic drift; that is, some transference of acquired traits to new generations is pure chance, though a greater majority is dependent on how the acquired trait is relevant to survival in one form or another.
Genetic drift is only the varied expression of various traits comprising of existing information. To gain the ability or to acquire completely new information there needs to be a complete reconstructing. This is where random mutations come in. This is why it is unpractical. There is frequently the play on words and ideas, to hide the mechanism of random mutation behind more practical terms. This is an attempt at mental conditioning as no matter where you place random mutation, no matter how many phrases cloak it, it is still the means through which Darwinism is built. And has to be built.
The probability argument is the underlying basis for atheistic belief. The attempt to imbue it on people takes on various forms given the occasion and/or discovery. When t was perceived that the cell was just a glob of protoplasm, there was the chance formation of that glob. When we discovered the DNA code, chance formation changes into chance mutation. Should we discover a great pyramid inside DNA, chance mutation changes to chance building. Thats all that's happening. The emperor merely dresses in different clothes, but it is the
same guy. The defining factor is that the odds against chance are not falling but rising. At this point it is just plain ridiculous. And from what I have seen, there is something on the burner which is going to make it even worse.
Not all materialism is necessarily opposed to the idea of the Christian God's sovereignty and will, it's merely a minority paradigm from which to derive and qualify the Christian view.
Frirst of all, there's no such thing as a "Christian God". You are again attempting isolation and segregation. All force emanates from one source. Every entity is a child of the same Father.
It's certainly new, but that doesn't make it contradictory. If anything, the spiritual in your perception seems to be something purely abstracted and obscurantist, something we cannot have any cognizance of, only intuition.Physical and psychical/psychological are certainly intertwined.
The carnal eye has it's limits. The three dimensional mind has its limits. But within man is the image of God. Not the carnal body alone, but the body mind and spirit, working in unison, connects the entity to his/her maker. The corporeal body is a manifestation of mind, as are all things. Its state is attributed to differentiation in vibration and frequency. With this state comes the corollaries of the three dimensional plane, the 3 dimensional mind, which deals primarily with the sustenance of the physical body. Primal instincts, separation, selfishness, only the strong survive, the will to procreate, and all concepts of the like has its roots here. Though the material mind is a manifestation of that one force, thus inseparable from that basic substrate, the mind is also of the spiritual. These are the two kings which are in conflict. The most basic of all battles a human faces everyday. When the Nazarene said,
"This heaven will pass away, and the one above it will pass away. The dead are not alive, and the living will not die. During the days when you ate what is dead, you made it come alive. When you are in the light, what will you do? On the day when you were one, you became two. But when you become two, what will you do?"
"Jesus saw some babies nursing. He said to his disciples, "These nursing babies are like those who enter the (Father's) kingdom."
They said to him, "Then shall we enter the (Father's) kingdom as babies?"
Jesus said to them, "When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make male and female into a single one, so that the male will not be male nor the female be female, when you make eyes in place of an eye, a hand in place of a hand, a foot in place of a foot, an image in place of an image, then you will enter [the kingdom].", these remain to be interpreted.
The spiritual, if by spiritual we mean more subjective and aesthetic ideas, is relatively separate from the physical, or at least not as dependent on the physical in the sense of genetics, but on the environment, the culture.
Any projection into the universal concept grants one the ability to reach their Father. The Christ is embodied by Jesus. The Son of God is a universal concept. Jesus was able to reach that state because of who he was, but who he was is not something that only Christians can be and not others. Your appeal to culture and environment is the "if you were born in india" argument by Richard Dawkins. This in itself is a fallacy. Though by culture and environment one is a Christian, one is connected to each and every person not through subjective ideas, but the ideals. Ideals of this kind are of the spiritual nature, and ideas have descended from that common source, the ideal, not vice versa. Whether your path is for the attainment of that Krishna consciousness or the Christ consciousness, given that the ideal is related, as they often are, the destination is the same.
Building isn't random, therefore you're making a fallacious comparison. Not to mention evolutionary biology doesn't say that any organism is built or created, which is a presumption of creationist cosmology.
Stochastic events, whether it be of the general nature or its incorporation into biological or cosmological revelations , remain undirected. Evolutionary biologists would be hard pressed to compare the biological application of chance to the mechanical application of chance in a 747 as it would be quite difficult to swallow. But its the same thing in another form. For the sake of natural objects I will use a wooden house. You have the wood, you have the vines you have the mud, you have the grass. A structurally unstable build will fall apart or "die" and the process will begin anew. Every time a piece of wood falls in the correct position, in the correct order, vines tying at the correct time, the structure will stand or be "naturally selected" and more will be added to it. When the build on top of it is unstable it will fall apart, what has already been built will stand and you will start over. I can guarantee that you cannot get a successfully frame, a vine knot or even 2 trees to be cut in even sections rendering stability and later integration. As for the instructions carved in a rock which can be decoded to accurately depict an assemblage of parts, thats a different story. Lets rule out the rush needed because of predation, and environmental changes, making this even easier to accomplish than biological systems.
So to clarify, I don't believe what you describe as evolution, therefore we aren't in disagreement on this particular dichotomy. Evolution is more complex than you generalize it to be.
It is an accurate model.
No one attributes the pyramids to a rock slide or chance.
What if it was dated at having been first built 720 million years ago. When Darwinists hold that there was no intelligent life capable of doing such. This changes everything. Rock throwing to build a pyramid becomes "science".
And man was no more created than birds or reptiles, they are all generated over time and this is hardly in opposition to even a Christian worldview, since the agent behind the process can still be God, even if the involvement is more subtle.
Man is a created being. The manifestation of the mind which is man was and is, always man. "The agent behind the process can still be God" line is merely the latest attempt to conjoin accidental origin, which has always been the pride of atheism now taking the form of Darwinism, and the design of life. Though it is now cloaked in a new form, which adds appeal to it, which makes it less noticeable, it is the same thing. Chance origin. Further, that Christians have accepted it, is not a form of argument. It is the past which supplements the present. It is the root from which the tree grows and persists. Though this is a more subtle presentation seems to be working, it remains what it is. Chance origin. A flower removed from the earth will dry up. And those who have been uprooted from their past will soon come under confusion about their present. When the time is ripe, they will be picked off one by one.
Lack of perception of a particular phenomena doesn't suggest that you can't accept that it has conceptual existence. Numbers are not seen except in character representation, colors are variations of the light frequency, and so on.
You seem to have completely missed the point. Telling a person the particular wave length and frequency of a color, still does not convey to them the exact experience of that color. This could have been used as an example but I chose emotions as this is better experienced.
You can't make a comparison to a blind person being unable to see colors to extending that into saying a non theist can't understand love and trust.
Citations.
Emotions are not contingent upon believing in a God that has a vested interest in advancing our emotions. So yes, emotions and ethics can be, and have been effectively, separated from God. This doesn't negate their claims to affect our behavior, in fact, they'd potentially have much more importance because we take responsibility ourselves instead of relegating it to God to tell us what to do and why.
Kind sir, the usage of emotions and colors are analogical comparisons to Man's need to "see" God and what God is. Not only as a representation but a reality in all planes of existence manifested in what
we can perceive. I was not saying that emotions are contingent upon God. Thats a completely different topic. Read previous post again.
Something can have intent and a "program" but still have an element of randomness to it. Random number generator for example, though this gets into an issue of what true randomness is, which necessitates another thread entirely.
A random number generator's purpose is to generate random numbers. I would not use it in systems where predictable outcomes are required. Like the human body. Also, Ive already pointed out to you that adaptation itself, is a coded feature.
