and paul failing again. He has no idea what evolutionary theory is and attacks his own strawman version since he knows he has nothing against the real thing.
Evolutionary theory isn’t a thing, it is a process. and it takes a long time. Trial and error over a very long time.
It’s so cute to watch theists lie and claim that the same science that they love when it makes them comfy is wrong when it shows that their fairy tales don’t work.
So your answer is: “Trial and error over a very long time.”
Oh dear!
Believe that story if you want. But ‘trial and error’ seems an inadequate explanation of the scary face in the photo. Hard to see how this could produce something so artistically sophisticated. You will need to come up with a much better explanation.
There’s no need for her to provide a better explanation, for her explanation is the correct one. It’s up to you to educate yourself as to how evolution works, instead of mangling it.
“Those who have seriously criticized these arguments have certainly shown that there are ways to resist the design conclusion; but the general force of the negative part of the intelligent design position—skepticism about the likelihood of the orthodox reductive view, given the available evidence—does not appear to me to have been destroyed in these exchanges. At least, the question should be regarded as open. To anyone interested in the basis of this judgment, I can only recommend a careful reading of some of the leading advocates on both sides of the issue—with special attention to what has been established by the critics of intelligent design.
Whatever one may think about the possibility of a designer, the prevailing doctrine—that the appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms has involved nothing but the operation of physical law—cannot be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis.”
― Dr Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
Yep dear, that’s what I’m saying. The laws of physics control evolution and poor Paul can’t show otherwise.
As usual, Paul is willfully ignorant about evolutionary theory and is too much of a coward to actually address what it really says. He has to invent a process that doesn’t exist at all to try to play pretend his god exists.
Ooooh, “scary face”. Nope, dear that is a rather nice imitation of a owl. You do know what an owl is, don’t you?
Nothing “artistically sophisticated” at all. Just trial and error until something worked and then that pattern was passed down to its descendants, just like evolutionary theory describes.
What poor Paul wants to claim is that his god painted moths. Poor god, so busy painting moths so that this incompetent thing can’t actually help people.
Quite a “explanation”, Paul. Just one more just-so story invented by religion to give their god/gods a job.
poor Paul, again has to lie and make excuses since he has nothing else. No evidence for Paul’s god, and no evidence that Paul’s god is responsible for creation. Paul only has the same nonsense that he claims is wrong if another type of theist uses it.
A shame that Paul’s god has to rely on such incompetents and liars like Paul. One might think it doesn’t exist at all.
Why, yes, yes I am. Poor theist, you have to decry science when it shows you are wrong, while all of the time enjoying its fruits. Such a sad little selfish hypocrite.
You have no idea what evolutionary theory says as evidenced by your pathetic lies about it. It’s easy to be willfully ignorant when you so desperately need to imagine that you know some special secrets to support your self-worth.
In order for animals to survive there habitat all the information would have been established from the beginning. There’s no theory with any evidence over 4 billion years to suggest otherwise. Feel free to carry on with your circular reasoning, sir.
This isn’t true. Environments have changed over time, this is a known fact. There’s plenty of evidence for geological change. Plus, many animals have gone extinct because they couldn’t adapt quickly enough to changing conditions. The ‘information’ that allows animals to survive is built on the bones of species that didn’t have it, and therefore died out. Each new generation inputs new information into the equation, some of it being faulty, which is why history is filled with mutations that failed.
Nope, one more false and baseless claim. But do show how this works, dear. Give all of the details on how this works and golly, you could win a Nobel Prize. But of course you have nothing, just one more theist who makes up nonsense just like all of the theists he claims are wrong.
Poor things, your religion depends on willful ignorance and desperately hoping no one finds any more evidence to close those gaps your try to stuff your gods into.
As usual, a theist has no idea what evolutionary theory says. it is not blind nor is it directionless. It is regulated by physics which is a known factor. This is not some Dr. Seussian world where anything at all can happen.
We have no reason to think that the laws of physics aren’t as “eternal” as your various gods that you invent. So, god and sabit aren’t needed at all and aren’t important.
I will firstly thank you for a measured reply. You’ll forgive me if I am surprised, but thank you nonetheless.
Secondly, I hope you will appreciate that I, like quite a few people right now, am not in a position to be buying books, irrespective of what side they fall under, in the current climate. Everything is focused on rent, tax and food at the moment. To that end, assuming you’ve read the above book, I gather you can quote the key arguments?
And I also taught introduction to molecular biology to community college students for a semester 15 years ago.
I believe life forms evolved but it is impossible that there was no design from the point where the universe began.
Evolution cannot explain what started everything off…you need living cells for evolution to get off the ground.
You mentioned time….but statistically there is not enough time…if one is super lucky a teeny-tiny part of one small protein might be imaginable in billions of years but not many proteins and many proteins are needed for the simplest of cells that is to have the miraculous ability to duplicate itself in an exact copy of itself.
There are too many problems…one should expect a massive number of transitional skeletons for every functional organism…but it is not seen.
Apart from evolution, you need the perfect mathematical law and the perfect conditions at literally time = 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds
And there is no evolution that occurs to evolve natural laws or conditions in
0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001
seconds
One can keep thinking science will explain it but whatever explanation one comes up, science cannot even in principle ever explain why that scenario instead of literally an infinite other scenarios that are more and more chaotic.
The most intelligent, wise, and ethical decision is to submit to God who can be the only cause of all this and of consciousness (awareness and the higher consciousness of consciousness –self-awareness), morality, and intelligence.
It is difficult for those not used to and it does not mean that non believers are worse than believers because there can be a host of factors leading believers to believe such as social conditioning…and since I know that and you know that…of course God who gave us intelligence knows that with perfection.
Having said all that….we should strive to be the best…if it is difficult to submit to God, at least pray to God 3 times a day…when you wake up, in mid-day, and before you sleep to ask for forgiveness for any shortcomings that you know and don’t know and ask for guidance and thank Him for existence and providence.
If there is no God, taking that 5 minutes three times a day will not harm you….at the least it will give you peace of mind…
But there is God…without God, nothing makes sense and we have to resort to science of the infinite regress gaps.
I wish you the best.
Be the best person you can be and acting as if we can say with certainty there is no God and then dismissing our creator if He exists is not the best we can be …..not in the least.
Omer, could you please be contributer, editor and user on my website? Because, I have a great project to make in near future and I would need contributers. The rest of the project, we will talk privately. What you say bro? Please, it is really important.
I want to repeat if I can that I think one psychological reason people stick to their beliefs is that they assume that if they can their worldview, then they are conceding that the other person is more good in front of God…again that is not necessarily true in all situations since often people believe in the way they were conditioned…the reason why I said that God knows that is to imply the corollary that God will judge us all with fairness and mercy…and let us focus only on ourselves….we can share with each other what we think is right and what we think is wrong…but at the ultimate level, we can make a final decision on only one heart…our own….let’s trust God to judge all with his complete wisdom and complete goodness…and let us try to be the best we can.
Dear Paul, thanks much for your appreciation. And thanks again for letting me post…if it wasn’t for your blog, then I would not have been able to post.
Dear Alexander, thank you for the invitation…I can try to contribute…I am not able to be editor and I can’t be assumed to approve of any content other than what I write and I don’t expect for you to agree with everything I write……I will inshallah try to contact you by tomorrow using the contact form at your website…
But please don’t lose your temper and say anything mean or anything that sounds extreme….I learned from you to not be rude to Paul the other day….I hope we can learn from each other….and be gentle if we disagree….it is the way of the Prophet Muhammad and Prophet Jesus to be straight forward but not insulting…
We should kind to all whether Muslims, People of the Book, etc.
And do not argue with the People of the Scripture except in a way that is best, except for those who commit injustice among them, and say, “We believe in that which has been revealed to us and revealed to you. And our God and your God is one; and we are Muslims [in submission] to Him.” (Surah 29, verse 46)
Bro, I will try to control my temper. Sometimes I do not know how to control my temper. Also, I had traumatic childhood which is why today I cannot control my temper and loose my mind. And what makes me really angry, is that non-Muslims are trying to defame Islam and Muslims, this what makes me to loose my temper. Because, I don’t like defamatoriation.
I think that, in part at least, we’re mixing the origins of life with the evolution of life here, a little bit? They’re similar subjects in some ways, but not completely.
Evolution is something which has been observed in real time – the peppered moth evolved, within a handful of generations – a darker colouring because of pollution, to continue to be hard for birds to spot. Insects will develop resistance to pesticides within a few generations. There is on-going human evolution against malaria. https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-evolution.html
So, in terms of time… we can see evolution happening over short spans of it, and we’ve certainly got plenty of fossil records to show historical evolution, going back millions of years. We also know from these records that evolution certainly does not appear to be directed – there are, as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, many dead-ends – many examples of mutations that failed, and many, many extinctions where species could not adapt fast enough to our changing planet.
There is then the question of probability. I *would* quote from this site: http://www.creationtheory.org/Probability/Page03.xhtml
However, there’s some java-script stuff going on that wouldn’t be easily quotable. Nonetheless, it looks at the apparent odds of evolution, and the actual odds, based on how evolution has been observed to work.
[QUOTE]Intelligent Design theory may be bad science, but it is good politics. People with no grounding in the scientific method and philosophy are highly susceptible to its arguments, for the simple reason that the scientific method does not come naturally to people. After all, if the scientific method did come naturally to people, it wouldn’t have taken humanity more than three thousand years after the discovery of iron to figure out that you can make a boat out of it.
So what is the basic philosophy of Intelligent Design, and how does it differ from the philosophy of science? Well let’s review: the Intelligent Design argument goes like this:
“Evolutionists cannot explain exactly how [insert species or organ name here] evolved.”
“Therefore, evolution theory cannot explain how it evolved.”
“Therefore, it could not have evolved.”
“Therefore, it must have been magically created by God … er, an “intelligent designer”.”
Each of these steps is riddled with falsehoods and basic logic errors. Let us address them one at a time, before we discuss the fundamental reason why Intelligent Design is completely useless.[/quote]
You say nothing makes sense without God… to me, a lot of God’s actions don’t make sense. We are led to believe God is kind, just and merciful, yet many of God’s actions and commands do not strike me as being kind, or just, or merciful. Yet we are meant to submit to such a being.
I want to respond very briefly to your personal comment below…
“You say nothing makes sense without God… to me, a lot of God’s actions don’t make sense. We are led to believe God is kind, just and merciful, yet many of God’s actions and commands do not strike me as being kind, or just, or merciful. Yet we are meant to submit to such a being.”
It is good that the injustices and so on don’t make sense to you….I commend you for your sensitivity that there is much wrong in our world.
I think God would be pleased that you sense that….after all, we must sense that or our moral compass is dead if don’t.
So I agree that we see a lot of injustice in the world.
And there is much that we don’t understand.
If this world as we are living right now is supposed to be the end, that is paradise, then I can understand how it would be beyond our capability as humans to accept this without having strong doubts as to it being perfect in terms of justice.
But as a Muslim, I am told in the Qur’an that this world is a test.
And that in the end, we will see justice…justice against those who were evil but nothing beyond what they deserve (even though God could inflict a zillion time and ever more pain if He was unjust) and we will see generosity by God for those who are good, in that they will receive what they deserve and much more.
Darthtimon, just like children cannot understand as much as adults, they begin to realize that adults know more than them and that a 7 year develops a conscience that he should listen to his 30 year old mom or 35 year old father.
I ask you,
Is not the difference between us and a creator of the universe unbelievably more vast in difference between a child and human being and the cause of all existence who would thus be perfect (not a being but the source of all being)?
I see that we should realize this even if there is no scriptures telling us this….
But on top of it we have religion telling us this in the Bible…many prophets told us….and it is very clearly expressed to us in the Qur’an.
Should we not take it seriously that we are receiving a revelation from God and we should be open to it perhaps being true?
Ultimately, we can claim the cause of all reality to be either perfect or not perfect.
If the cause is not perfect, then we have not really answered the question, since the exact same question can again be posed as to what is the cause of this imperfect entity and why not –literally– an infinite other imperfect entities.
There are multiple ways which converge together to point to the ultimate cause as being perfect….that is God.
Now, I think the problem you are conflating is assuming that if God exists, then this reality we see right now has to be perfect.
That is not so….this life is just a test….a test to see what we will deserve when the test finishes.
I suggest to me above all and to everyone else that we spend our very little time that may expire any given day, even possibly today, and try to do best in our test rather than assuming that the test is the ultimate outcome and in not taking the accumulation of signs that God is sending us to recognize Him as our creator and sustainer.
Regarding the links you sent me, thank you for your time and effort in doing that…please excuse me for not having seeing them yet…I will try to do so.
I agree that origin of life and evolution are not the same.
But I think you mixing microevolution with macroevolution. Yes, we see that organisms are able to adapt to their changing environments and let us thank God for that. Would not life have been terrible if we could not adapt?
But speciation, that is the development of entirely new species from other species has never been seen. I am not saying it did not happen. I believe in both microevolution and macroevolution.
However, to my mind, macroevolution (speciation) is impossible without a supreme intelligent designer for many reasons, some of which I mentioned in the previous post.
https://bloggingtheology210345017.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/screenshot-2020-09-02-at-17.54.32.png
I like greg❤, unfortunately that majic wand that he holds tight to hoping one day it might work just isn’t going to happen.
and paul failing again. He has no idea what evolutionary theory is and attacks his own strawman version since he knows he has nothing against the real thing.
Evolutionary theory isn’t a thing, it is a process. and it takes a long time. Trial and error over a very long time.
It’s so cute to watch theists lie and claim that the same science that they love when it makes them comfy is wrong when it shows that their fairy tales don’t work.
So your answer is: “Trial and error over a very long time.”
Oh dear!
Believe that story if you want. But ‘trial and error’ seems an inadequate explanation of the scary face in the photo. Hard to see how this could produce something so artistically sophisticated. You will need to come up with a much better explanation.
There’s no need for her to provide a better explanation, for her explanation is the correct one. It’s up to you to educate yourself as to how evolution works, instead of mangling it.
“Those who have seriously criticized these arguments have certainly shown that there are ways to resist the design conclusion; but the general force of the negative part of the intelligent design position—skepticism about the likelihood of the orthodox reductive view, given the available evidence—does not appear to me to have been destroyed in these exchanges. At least, the question should be regarded as open. To anyone interested in the basis of this judgment, I can only recommend a careful reading of some of the leading advocates on both sides of the issue—with special attention to what has been established by the critics of intelligent design.
Whatever one may think about the possibility of a designer, the prevailing doctrine—that the appearance of life from dead matter and its evolution through accidental mutation and natural selection to its present forms has involved nothing but the operation of physical law—cannot be regarded as unassailable. It is an assumption governing the scientific project rather than a well-confirmed scientific hypothesis.”
― Dr Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False
https://bloggingtheology210345017.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/118772658_10159204010713465_4258271217414042997_n.jpg
Yep dear, that’s what I’m saying. The laws of physics control evolution and poor Paul can’t show otherwise.
As usual, Paul is willfully ignorant about evolutionary theory and is too much of a coward to actually address what it really says. He has to invent a process that doesn’t exist at all to try to play pretend his god exists.
Ooooh, “scary face”. Nope, dear that is a rather nice imitation of a owl. You do know what an owl is, don’t you?
Nothing “artistically sophisticated” at all. Just trial and error until something worked and then that pattern was passed down to its descendants, just like evolutionary theory describes.
What poor Paul wants to claim is that his god painted moths. Poor god, so busy painting moths so that this incompetent thing can’t actually help people.
Quite a “explanation”, Paul. Just one more just-so story invented by religion to give their god/gods a job.
Teenage ranting. Not worth a response. I’ll wait till you grow up a bit 😜
poor Paul, again has to lie and make excuses since he has nothing else. No evidence for Paul’s god, and no evidence that Paul’s god is responsible for creation. Paul only has the same nonsense that he claims is wrong if another type of theist uses it.
A shame that Paul’s god has to rely on such incompetents and liars like Paul. One might think it doesn’t exist at all.
How old are you? Does your mother know you are online?
Are you really just going to stand your ground on evolution theory with your head so high? Ridiculous
Who said anything about standing ground? However evolution has passed every test made of it so far.
Why, yes, yes I am. Poor theist, you have to decry science when it shows you are wrong, while all of the time enjoying its fruits. Such a sad little selfish hypocrite.
You have no idea what evolutionary theory says as evidenced by your pathetic lies about it. It’s easy to be willfully ignorant when you so desperately need to imagine that you know some special secrets to support your self-worth.
In order for animals to survive there habitat all the information would have been established from the beginning. There’s no theory with any evidence over 4 billion years to suggest otherwise. Feel free to carry on with your circular reasoning, sir.
This isn’t true. Environments have changed over time, this is a known fact. There’s plenty of evidence for geological change. Plus, many animals have gone extinct because they couldn’t adapt quickly enough to changing conditions. The ‘information’ that allows animals to survive is built on the bones of species that didn’t have it, and therefore died out. Each new generation inputs new information into the equation, some of it being faulty, which is why history is filled with mutations that failed.
Nope, one more false and baseless claim. But do show how this works, dear. Give all of the details on how this works and golly, you could win a Nobel Prize. But of course you have nothing, just one more theist who makes up nonsense just like all of the theists he claims are wrong.
Poor things, your religion depends on willful ignorance and desperately hoping no one finds any more evidence to close those gaps your try to stuff your gods into.
As usual, a theist has no idea what evolutionary theory says. it is not blind nor is it directionless. It is regulated by physics which is a known factor. This is not some Dr. Seussian world where anything at all can happen.
We have no reason to think that the laws of physics aren’t as “eternal” as your various gods that you invent. So, god and sabit aren’t needed at all and aren’t important.
Lady haven’t I schooled you in the past enough already?
I’m starting to think you like getting put in your place by strong Muslim men.
I will firstly thank you for a measured reply. You’ll forgive me if I am surprised, but thank you nonetheless.
Secondly, I hope you will appreciate that I, like quite a few people right now, am not in a position to be buying books, irrespective of what side they fall under, in the current climate. Everything is focused on rent, tax and food at the moment. To that end, assuming you’ve read the above book, I gather you can quote the key arguments?
Hi Darthtimon,
I am a physician.
And I also taught introduction to molecular biology to community college students for a semester 15 years ago.
I believe life forms evolved but it is impossible that there was no design from the point where the universe began.
Evolution cannot explain what started everything off…you need living cells for evolution to get off the ground.
You mentioned time….but statistically there is not enough time…if one is super lucky a teeny-tiny part of one small protein might be imaginable in billions of years but not many proteins and many proteins are needed for the simplest of cells that is to have the miraculous ability to duplicate itself in an exact copy of itself.
There are too many problems…one should expect a massive number of transitional skeletons for every functional organism…but it is not seen.
Apart from evolution, you need the perfect mathematical law and the perfect conditions at literally time = 0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001 seconds
And there is no evolution that occurs to evolve natural laws or conditions in
0.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001
seconds
One can keep thinking science will explain it but whatever explanation one comes up, science cannot even in principle ever explain why that scenario instead of literally an infinite other scenarios that are more and more chaotic.
The most intelligent, wise, and ethical decision is to submit to God who can be the only cause of all this and of consciousness (awareness and the higher consciousness of consciousness –self-awareness), morality, and intelligence.
It is difficult for those not used to and it does not mean that non believers are worse than believers because there can be a host of factors leading believers to believe such as social conditioning…and since I know that and you know that…of course God who gave us intelligence knows that with perfection.
Having said all that….we should strive to be the best…if it is difficult to submit to God, at least pray to God 3 times a day…when you wake up, in mid-day, and before you sleep to ask for forgiveness for any shortcomings that you know and don’t know and ask for guidance and thank Him for existence and providence.
If there is no God, taking that 5 minutes three times a day will not harm you….at the least it will give you peace of mind…
But there is God…without God, nothing makes sense and we have to resort to science of the infinite regress gaps.
I wish you the best.
Be the best person you can be and acting as if we can say with certainty there is no God and then dismissing our creator if He exists is not the best we can be …..not in the least.
Peace,
Omer
Awesome 👏
Assalamu alaikum,
Omer, could you please be contributer, editor and user on my website? Because, I have a great project to make in near future and I would need contributers. The rest of the project, we will talk privately. What you say bro? Please, it is really important.
Dear Darthtimon,
I want to repeat if I can that I think one psychological reason people stick to their beliefs is that they assume that if they can their worldview, then they are conceding that the other person is more good in front of God…again that is not necessarily true in all situations since often people believe in the way they were conditioned…the reason why I said that God knows that is to imply the corollary that God will judge us all with fairness and mercy…and let us focus only on ourselves….we can share with each other what we think is right and what we think is wrong…but at the ultimate level, we can make a final decision on only one heart…our own….let’s trust God to judge all with his complete wisdom and complete goodness…and let us try to be the best we can.
Dear Paul, thanks much for your appreciation. And thanks again for letting me post…if it wasn’t for your blog, then I would not have been able to post.
Dear Alexander, thank you for the invitation…I can try to contribute…I am not able to be editor and I can’t be assumed to approve of any content other than what I write and I don’t expect for you to agree with everything I write……I will inshallah try to contact you by tomorrow using the contact form at your website…
But please don’t lose your temper and say anything mean or anything that sounds extreme….I learned from you to not be rude to Paul the other day….I hope we can learn from each other….and be gentle if we disagree….it is the way of the Prophet Muhammad and Prophet Jesus to be straight forward but not insulting…
We should kind to all whether Muslims, People of the Book, etc.
And do not argue with the People of the Scripture except in a way that is best, except for those who commit injustice among them, and say, “We believe in that which has been revealed to us and revealed to you. And our God and your God is one; and we are Muslims [in submission] to Him.” (Surah 29, verse 46)
Jazakhalakhair
Bro, I will try to control my temper. Sometimes I do not know how to control my temper. Also, I had traumatic childhood which is why today I cannot control my temper and loose my mind. And what makes me really angry, is that non-Muslims are trying to defame Islam and Muslims, this what makes me to loose my temper. Because, I don’t like defamatoriation.
Thank you Omer for your reply,
I think that, in part at least, we’re mixing the origins of life with the evolution of life here, a little bit? They’re similar subjects in some ways, but not completely.
Evolution is something which has been observed in real time – the peppered moth evolved, within a handful of generations – a darker colouring because of pollution, to continue to be hard for birds to spot. Insects will develop resistance to pesticides within a few generations. There is on-going human evolution against malaria. https://examples.yourdictionary.com/examples-of-evolution.html
So, in terms of time… we can see evolution happening over short spans of it, and we’ve certainly got plenty of fossil records to show historical evolution, going back millions of years. We also know from these records that evolution certainly does not appear to be directed – there are, as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, many dead-ends – many examples of mutations that failed, and many, many extinctions where species could not adapt fast enough to our changing planet.
There is then the question of probability. I *would* quote from this site: http://www.creationtheory.org/Probability/Page03.xhtml
However, there’s some java-script stuff going on that wouldn’t be easily quotable. Nonetheless, it looks at the apparent odds of evolution, and the actual odds, based on how evolution has been observed to work.
The same author also has this to say about intelligent design – http://www.creationtheory.org/Essays/IntelligentDesignIsUseless.xhtml
[QUOTE]Intelligent Design theory may be bad science, but it is good politics. People with no grounding in the scientific method and philosophy are highly susceptible to its arguments, for the simple reason that the scientific method does not come naturally to people. After all, if the scientific method did come naturally to people, it wouldn’t have taken humanity more than three thousand years after the discovery of iron to figure out that you can make a boat out of it.
So what is the basic philosophy of Intelligent Design, and how does it differ from the philosophy of science? Well let’s review: the Intelligent Design argument goes like this:
“Evolutionists cannot explain exactly how [insert species or organ name here] evolved.”
“Therefore, evolution theory cannot explain how it evolved.”
“Therefore, it could not have evolved.”
“Therefore, it must have been magically created by God … er, an “intelligent designer”.”
Each of these steps is riddled with falsehoods and basic logic errors. Let us address them one at a time, before we discuss the fundamental reason why Intelligent Design is completely useless.[/quote]
You say nothing makes sense without God… to me, a lot of God’s actions don’t make sense. We are led to believe God is kind, just and merciful, yet many of God’s actions and commands do not strike me as being kind, or just, or merciful. Yet we are meant to submit to such a being.
Dear Darthtimon,
I want to respond very briefly to your personal comment below…
“You say nothing makes sense without God… to me, a lot of God’s actions don’t make sense. We are led to believe God is kind, just and merciful, yet many of God’s actions and commands do not strike me as being kind, or just, or merciful. Yet we are meant to submit to such a being.”
It is good that the injustices and so on don’t make sense to you….I commend you for your sensitivity that there is much wrong in our world.
I think God would be pleased that you sense that….after all, we must sense that or our moral compass is dead if don’t.
So I agree that we see a lot of injustice in the world.
And there is much that we don’t understand.
If this world as we are living right now is supposed to be the end, that is paradise, then I can understand how it would be beyond our capability as humans to accept this without having strong doubts as to it being perfect in terms of justice.
But as a Muslim, I am told in the Qur’an that this world is a test.
And that in the end, we will see justice…justice against those who were evil but nothing beyond what they deserve (even though God could inflict a zillion time and ever more pain if He was unjust) and we will see generosity by God for those who are good, in that they will receive what they deserve and much more.
Darthtimon, just like children cannot understand as much as adults, they begin to realize that adults know more than them and that a 7 year develops a conscience that he should listen to his 30 year old mom or 35 year old father.
I ask you,
Is not the difference between us and a creator of the universe unbelievably more vast in difference between a child and human being and the cause of all existence who would thus be perfect (not a being but the source of all being)?
I see that we should realize this even if there is no scriptures telling us this….
But on top of it we have religion telling us this in the Bible…many prophets told us….and it is very clearly expressed to us in the Qur’an.
Should we not take it seriously that we are receiving a revelation from God and we should be open to it perhaps being true?
Ultimately, we can claim the cause of all reality to be either perfect or not perfect.
If the cause is not perfect, then we have not really answered the question, since the exact same question can again be posed as to what is the cause of this imperfect entity and why not –literally– an infinite other imperfect entities.
There are multiple ways which converge together to point to the ultimate cause as being perfect….that is God.
Now, I think the problem you are conflating is assuming that if God exists, then this reality we see right now has to be perfect.
That is not so….this life is just a test….a test to see what we will deserve when the test finishes.
I suggest to me above all and to everyone else that we spend our very little time that may expire any given day, even possibly today, and try to do best in our test rather than assuming that the test is the ultimate outcome and in not taking the accumulation of signs that God is sending us to recognize Him as our creator and sustainer.
Regarding the links you sent me, thank you for your time and effort in doing that…please excuse me for not having seeing them yet…I will try to do so.
I agree that origin of life and evolution are not the same.
But I think you mixing microevolution with macroevolution. Yes, we see that organisms are able to adapt to their changing environments and let us thank God for that. Would not life have been terrible if we could not adapt?
But speciation, that is the development of entirely new species from other species has never been seen. I am not saying it did not happen. I believe in both microevolution and macroevolution.
However, to my mind, macroevolution (speciation) is impossible without a supreme intelligent designer for many reasons, some of which I mentioned in the previous post.
Peace
Omer (brotheromer)
photoshop
😂
Actually, it is photoshop.
The original picture is in Wikipedia:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Lymantria_dispar01.jpg
And it’s on this page:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lymantria_dispar
So your “original” picture is designed – by a human.
thanks. Interesting.
reason 🎓
Williams 🦄
https://bloggingtheology210345017.files.wordpress.com/2020/09/mqyzvnq60g421.jpg