God created evolution

Yes, I do. It's called "moving the discussion forward". The point you didn't address was the difference between a God and an incompetent designer. A god who is still learning and growing, as the OP suggests, seems plausible but it doesn't seem plausible that the God usually postulated by creationists and IDists - a God who is omnipotent, omniscient, blah, blah, blah - would have such a big junk pile.

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

You made the following staement: Whenever a theist makes a similar claim as to something that constitutes evidence there is always a crowd that jumps all over him/her pointing out that it isn't evidence.I just didn't see the same condemation in this case.Even if I agree that there were mistakes made it still isn't evidence that there is no designer. A bad design is still a design.

This presupposes that a designer intended species to be permanent.Given the thread title "God created evolution" it seems inappropriate to assume that species were divinely intended to be permanent.

Yes Probably OK I am convinced that there is a designer. (I also go further and accept that it is the Christian God but that isn't part of this discussion.)Biologists have uncovered a great deal of evidence that leads to accept an evolutionary process. I'm not a biologist but I'm prepared to go along with the consensus of those who are.Everything that I see and experience in this world, from the fact that there is something instead of nothing, the complexity and fine tuning of the universe, the fact that there is life at all, the fact that we have creatures with emotions, the fact that we have a sense of right and wrong and even the fact that we can contemplate any god at all indicates to me that in all of this there is design, and if there is design there is likely a designer.As far as God being involved in evolution is concerned, It seems to me that there are different possibilities that I could go along with. I'm ok with the idea that God designed the whole process at the get go and allowed it to run its course and only intervened on a non-physical level. I favour the position that the process was designed and that God intervened as required.I contend that this makes sense from both a scientific point of view but also from a scriptural point of view as long as you don't try to read the OT as a science text or a newspaper. The most obvious example is the flood in which God essentially starts over. (I'm not arguing here for a literal world wide flood.)I've made the statement before that I believe that God has given us 2 scriptures. One is the Bible and the other is His creation. We can learn about God from both but from different angles. In that sense I see theologians, philosophers and scientists all having something to teach us about the creator.

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Everybody is entitled to my opinion.

In the way the terms are used on this form I'm not a creationist IDer. I don't see where in the Bible we get the term omnipotent from. The closest we get would be calling him the Almighty but that isn't the same as omnipotent.I have a hunch that to my dog I'm viewed ass something like omnipotent but the fact is that he's wrong. Frankly a creator that can bring this creation to where it is today is good enough for me. If some of His designs didn't work out then so be it. Just the same, we are looking at things from our own perspective and there is likely a much bigger picture that we aren't able to envision.

Fair point.

This is where I get confused. My understanding of Yahweh is that he is perfect. He should not make errors and the fact that most organisms are now dead indicates that they were not made to match the needs of their environment.My thoughts are that if our world was designed I would expect to see no extinct species. As we do see them, I see this as evidence against design.I did try to pick an evidence that was not open to 'that's evidence of design, too'.

But How Mediocre Thou Art doesn't have the same ring to it.

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

Who knows what limitations God would have had to deal with. Both science and the Bible believe in a creation that came about over time. With your understanding of Yahweh I would be inclined to think that he would just have poofed the world, complete with sentient beings in place, in one instant act of creation. You start off the sentence with "my thoughts' and that was my point. It is your opinion. It isn't evidence in the way that this board seems to operate in terms of what constitutes evidence. I should know as I been down that road from the other side enough times.

We have a universe so large that we can't determine even if it is infinite or not, we have a world that is able to maintain life, life does actually exist, that life is made up of cells that are unbelievably complex and some of that life is sentient.That sure sounds "Great" to me.

Then make up your mind. Is your designer/god powerful or not? Every time a gap in human understanding is closed, believers try to jam their god into another one. He's getting smaller, not bigger.

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

I essentially gave you the reason I believe that God is powerful, great or whatever you want to call it. I'm sorry that He didn't consult with you first so that He could have incorporated your ideas in how it really should have been done.

What I'm suggesting is that believers should consult a little common sense. They talk about a being great enough to create a galaxy or a cell but they ignore the medium-sized things like mountains that we can see creating themselves. They handwave away any mistakes their designer made ("It was supposed to be like that.") and they also handwave away the moral implications of designed suffering. I just wonder who they think the tapdancing is fooling (other than themselves).

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Life is like a Hot Wheels car. Sometimes it goes behind the couch and you can't find it.

Yes. Once you postulate "God", there is an unlimited number of different possibilities that you could go along with, because "God" can be anything your imagination wants it to be. What do you mean "intervened on a non-physical level"? Evolution of species is a physical process. No, it doesn't make sense from either a scientific or a scriptural point of view.You have no definition for what God is or what mechanism he used to intervene in evolution. You have no means of measuring any of those things. Therefore, scientifically, your idea that God created evolution is meaningless and useless.You have already accepted that evolution has happened over billions of years. So even if you regard The Flood as a metaphor for God starting evolution (if I'm correct in understanding that's what you mean), you must also accept that no human being could have been around at the time. So until we started to uncover the evidence for evolution within the past 200 years, no human being could have known about it to have devised a metaphor for it.

Not at all. My theological beliefs tell me that God created with only a very broad outline of the way in which he created. I'm content that what I can know beyond that I can learn from scientists. I just meant that I was open to the possibility that the entire evolutionary process was set in motion and that there was no further physical connection, and that some point in time God started connecting with humans spiritually. The study of evolution tells us essentially that through a long series of genetic mutations we have wound up with the life forms we have today. Science can only tell us what the process was. It doesn't tell us why there is a process.I'm not suggesting that science is going to answer the question of how God could intervene. Science is agnostic. I only mentioned the flood as an example of the fact that the Bible indicates that the work of creation was and is on-going.Just because I don't believe that the Bible should be read literally doesn't mean that I don't believe it to be true. C S Lewis puts it best in the following quote.

quote:

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Just as, on the factual side, a long preparation culminates in God’s becoming incarnate as Man, so, on the documentary side, the truth first appears in mythical form and then by a long process of condensing or focusing finally becomes incarnate as History. This involves the belief that Myth is ... a real though unfocused gleam of divine truth falling on human imagination. The Hebrews, like other peoples, had mythology: but as they were the chosen people so their mythology was the chosen mythology — the mythology chosen by God to be the vehicle of the earliest sacred truths, the first step in that process which ends in the New Testament where truth has become completely historical.

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Miracles Ch 15 CS Lewis

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