Another question for theistic evolution

2,172 Views | 29 Replies | Last: 5 yr ago by AstroAg17
Martin Q. Blank
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Do you believe what came about in nature is a sort of genetic engineering on God's part? Or could all of this have happened without God?
Sapper Redux
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Is there really an argument to be made? That's so broad. If you believe in theistic evolution, wouldn't the second question be redundant? If you believe a god created the universe, designed it, and is active in it, it's logically incoherent to then say the creation could have happened the exact same way without the theos.
Martin Q. Blank
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Maybe I worded the question incorrectly. Are the random mutations really random? Or are they specifically designed to occur like we do with genetic engineering?
MidTnAg
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AG
Martin Q. Blank said:

Maybe I worded the question incorrectly. Are the random mutations really random? Or are they specifically designed to occur like we do with genetic engineering?
random mutations by definition are random.
AgLiving06
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I think his question is whether something is ever truly random.
mesocosm
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AG
Martin Q. Blank said:

Maybe I worded the question incorrectly. Are the random mutations really random? Or are they specifically designed to occur like we do with genetic engineering?


Geez. You wanna try that again?
MidTnAg
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AG
Martin Q. Blank said:

Do you believe what came about in nature is a sort of genetic engineering on God's part? Or could all of this have happened without God?
All of this could have happened with or without a god. This was and still is an unbelievable ongoing complex chain of events involving the forming of billions and billions of galaxies over billions of years. Earth is just a tiny speck in the universe like a grain of sand in the Sarah Desert.
Aggie4Life02
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AG
MidTnAg said:

Martin Q. Blank said:

Maybe I worded the question incorrectly. Are the random mutations really random? Or are they specifically designed to occur like we do with genetic engineering?
random mutations by definition are random.


In a theistic universe, there is no such thing as random.
AgLiving06
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MidTnAg said:

Martin Q. Blank said:

Do you believe what came about in nature is a sort of genetic engineering on God's part? Or could all of this have happened without God?
All of this could have happened with or without a god. This was and still is an unbelievable ongoing complex chain of events involving the forming of billions and billions of galaxies over billions of years. Earth is just a tiny speck in the universe like a grain of sand in the Sarah Desert.

Only one of the two options answers the question of how something was created from nothing.
Star Wars Memes Only
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AgLiving06 said:

MidTnAg said:

Martin Q. Blank said:

Do you believe what came about in nature is a sort of genetic engineering on God's part? Or could all of this have happened without God?
All of this could have happened with or without a god. This was and still is an unbelievable ongoing complex chain of events involving the forming of billions and billions of galaxies over billions of years. Earth is just a tiny speck in the universe like a grain of sand in the Sarah Desert.

Only one of the two options answers the question of how something was created from nothing.


How something was created from something else*

Unless, of course, you're admitting God is nothing.

Checkmate Christians?
AgLiving06
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dargscisyhp said:

AgLiving06 said:

MidTnAg said:

Martin Q. Blank said:

Do you believe what came about in nature is a sort of genetic engineering on God's part? Or could all of this have happened without God?
All of this could have happened with or without a god. This was and still is an unbelievable ongoing complex chain of events involving the forming of billions and billions of galaxies over billions of years. Earth is just a tiny speck in the universe like a grain of sand in the Sarah Desert.

Only one of the two options answers the question of how something was created from nothing.


How something was created from something else*

Unless, of course, you're admitting God is nothing.

Checkmate Christians?

Where did I saw God was created?

I'm simply pointing out that if the universe was created, there logically should be a cause of it's creation.

Star Wars Memes Only
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You choose to solve the problem of the infinite regress by cutting off the regression at some point. That's fine, but you're making assertions about the nature of the cutoff and dismissing the possibility of a cutoff of any other nature. If you weren't doing the latter then your objection to MidTnAg wouldn't make much sense.
AgLiving06
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dargscisyhp said:

You choose to solve the problem of the infinite regress by cutting off the regression at some point. That's fine, but you're making assertions about the nature of the cutoff and dismissing the possibility of a cutoff of any other nature. If you weren't doing the latter then your objection to MidTnAg wouldn't make much sense.

If I understand what you are saying, you are saying that the universe has been around for an infinite amount of time and therefore has had infinite regressions.

That certainly isn't a scientific argument, but is there even logical support for it?
Star Wars Memes Only
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Sorry, I was clumsy in how I wrote. That's not what I mean.

What I mean is that every time we explain how something came about you can ask for an explanation of that explanation. For instance, I might say to you that we can explain how matter is constructed in chemical terms such as covalent bonds and so on. You're free to say, "yea, but where did that come from." Then I might explain to you things about electromagnetism and atoms and you can ask where that comes from and so on. I've typically heard this kind of thing called the infinite regression problem.

One of the theistic arguments I've heard against atheism is that atheists are doomed to an infinite regression of that sort because we can never explain ultimate origins of how things were created. Theists, however, can get out of this problem because God is not created but simply is. It is this idea that I thought you were espousing, and what I was responding to.
AgLiving06
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I don't think this is an "us" vs "them" situation though.

Aren't you essentially asking for us to put faith into something that you can't answer?

But I still go back to the basic argument that whatever begins to exist has a cause.

It actually sounds like you agree with me, you just say it will take infinite regression to get there.
Star Wars Memes Only
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What I'm objecting to is any claims you've made about the nature of the first cause, namely that it is God. I could conceive of other first causes.
Zobel
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AG
It doesn't really matter because at the end of the day we're talking about a closed system - our universe. There is simply no conceivable way a closed system could create itself. It requires an external agent. But, constraining the external agent with internal empirically derived labels (cause, create, etc) is irrational.
AgLiving06
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dargscisyhp said:

What I'm objecting to is any claims you've made about the nature of the first cause, namely that it is God. I could conceive of other first causes.

I've actually not mentioned God as a solution so far. I did point out to MidTnAg that of the two options he provided, God is the more logical, but that's the extent I've gone down that path.

I'm more interested in traits or characteristics that must have existed to create the first cause.

I'd like to hear your list though.
Sapper Redux
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k2aggie07 said:

It doesn't really matter because at the end of the day we're talking about a closed system - our universe. There is simply no conceivable way a closed system could create itself. It requires an external agent. But, constraining the external agent with internal empirically derived labels (cause, create, etc) is irrational.
You're making a lot of unproven assumptions.
Zobel
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AG
Oh? Do you have evidence against the conservation of mass and energy?
Sapper Redux
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k2aggie07 said:

Oh? Do you have evidence against the conservation of mass and energy?


The Big Bang. As we approach the beginning of the universe, there's no evidence that the laws of physics apply in the same way they do today.
Zobel
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AG
So what you're saying is maybe kinda sorta one time the law of conservation of energy didn't apply, but you're very confident that this exception - the one and only time we even think it might have happened - was an internal consequence?
Sapper Redux
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k2aggie07 said:

So what you're saying is maybe kinda sorta one time the law of conservation of energy didn't apply, but you're very confident that this exception - the one and only time we even think it might have happened - was an internal consequence?


Not kinda sorta. Expansion at the point of the Big Bang does not follow the laws of physics as we understand them. The reasons for this are not clear, but to say the universe is a completely and eternally closed system that always holds to laws and thus cannot have been created by anything other than some outside agency is not accurately representing the history of the universe.
Zobel
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AG
So you agree that the system had a causal beginning at which point in time the law of conservation of mass and energy was violated - or perhaps didn't exist yet or apply - but you're unwilling to say that is by definition an open system?

A closed system has no mass or energy transferring in or out of the control volume. Our control volume is arbitrarily large, but it is still a control volume.
Sapper Redux
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k2aggie07 said:

So you agree that the system had a causal beginning at which point in time the law of conservation of mass and energy was violated - or perhaps didn't exist yet or apply - but you're unwilling to say that is by definition an open system?

A closed system has no mass or energy transferring in or out of the control volume. Our control volume is arbitrarily large, but it is still a control volume.


You were the one who was arguing the universe is a closed system. I'm saying when expansion happened, there was creation of energy and mass. Saying a god did this is philosophical conjecture. You can't prove it one way or another. To say it's impossible for the universe itself to have done this is also conjecture. We don't know what happened before 1 Planck Time.
Zobel
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AG
The universe is a closed system, for every known observation of every known phenomenon. We have never observed mass or energy being created. Ever. Not once.

I did not say God did it. I said our system is closed, and therefore an external agent is required to create it.

You're left to argue that our universe is an open system - in opposition to all known physics and logic.
Martin Q. Blank
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AgLiving06 said:

I think his question is whether something is ever truly random.
No, my question is: without God "guiding" or "selecting" the mutations, could they have occurred in the same way? Is it possible for nature to have occurred without God? Or does it need God to overcome the impossibility of evolving on its own?
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Zobel
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AG
Thanks -- I enjoyed this article. However, this seems to me to not invalidate what I was saying in a universal sense (although clearly I was wrong in the specific sense).

Draw a system around our universe such that everything that exists exists inside it. There is still a conserved something, even if that boundary includes inflation, gravity, etc. Just like entropy increases, doesn't mean more stuff - even if stuff is spacetime - is made.
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