Where my world view diverges from most

You mistake ignorance for chance. I have no good reason to calibrate what I believe is known by what we can know given the facts that we don't know almost everything and that we don't know anything necessarily.

 

Contrasted with your apparent idealistic leaning is the number of people who have openly expressed their impression that the God of the Bible is a monster.

In the Bible He says: I make peace, and create evil. I the Lord do all these things (It's in there somewhere).

Perhaps rationalizing helps maintain black and white, no grey.

 

I mean, you keep saying it, but you're shying away from my attempts to actually examine it.

The "swensson" example is analogous to evolution (in so far that randomness plus selection generates complexity). I don't know where your "creative force" is found in that example (because you keep avoiding explaining the concept) but whatever the answer is, the same answer can be given about evolution.

Was it the random letters that was the "creative force"? Then random mutations are the creative force of biological evolution. Was it the selection of letters to keep constant that was the creative force? Then natural selection is a valid "creative force" of biological evolution too. Was neither randomness nor selection the creative force? Then evolution doesn't need a creative force to work either. But pick one, so I don't have to have three discussions with you in parallel.

Disagree? I'm letting you decide the answer. You have introduced a "creative force" that you haven't explained. I'm not trying to push my own understanding of a creative force on you, I'm trying to align my understanding of it with yours, I'm letting you pin the "creative force" label on any source you like.

 

Selection plays no role in the generation of complexity. The complexity to which you refer is generated solely by chance mutations. Chance cannot do that, no matter how much of it you have.

 

Impossible. God of the bible created evil. The bible plainly states it. I thought you were a christian. Do you not know what's in the bible?

One can't win with anyone claiming to be something and be clueless about said something. Those types just don't know what they talk about.

If one claims to be a christian, one should know what is in the bible.

 

When it's clearly stated, I God, create all things, good and evil, no need for inference. Even if translations differ, God is still the creator of ALL things. Per the bible.

So your inference is likely just so the bible or god, fits your personal narrative.
Which is what many religious people do anyway. It's why you can ask 100 christians a bible questions and get 100 different answers. Everyone spins it to their personality.

 

Ok, then my example shows that chance can indeed generate complexity. If you leave it to chance alone, like in your example of scrambling letters in a post, it will take 1282!/2 tries (which is an insanely long amount of time) but luckily, selection can speed that up.

So what makes you think chance cannot do that, especially in the face of an example in which chance explicitly does exactly that?

 

Any scriptural support for that?

I disagree, maybe you are just misinterpreting things, perhaps based on poor translations in certain instances.

"Things" and "properties of things" are two different things.

You can't blame God for creating someone else who's evil anymore than you can blame God for your own sins you choose to commit.

 

Chance cannot generate functional complexity.

 

The game of blackjack may seem random but once you know a little card counting it becomes a lot less random. Randomness only exists because of uncertainly and the unknown. Dice rolls are random because we can't perfectly predict the exact motion of the dice out of the hand. Card games can be random because we don't know the beginning order of the cards. All those things that appear to be random are governed by deterministic forces. NASA uses a lot of physics to make some incredible predictions about where things are going to land that initially appear to be random. Statisticians may give you a poll, and it has a random element because there is some uncertainly about the accuracy of our sample. Without uncertainly, randomness in statistics disappears (but maybe not in the quantum level).

 

Its actually mutations and natural selection together that do this. Mutations create the raw material, and natural selections selects the best stuff.

But mutations are.

But we have real examples of evolution happening today.

Yet many Christians claim that God made the universe out of nothing.

 

But doesn't God know how everything is going to turn out? If he made Hitler knowing what he was going to do it millions of people, that sounds kind of horrific. Also things like neurology and genetics influence the way we turn out in addition to the environment we grow up in. God certainly has a lot of control over this stuff.

 

Not quite. Lets say you have a complex feature that takes two mutations with each one improving the chance of survival. So we start with random mutations in millions of individuals. Eventually the first mutation happens in one individual. Natural selection then selects the first mutation and eventually that spreads to the whole population. Eventually the second mutation happens and that spreads too. Natural selection has a way of gathering together positive mutations and spreading them to the entire population.

 

Why should dumb luck make everything similar? It seems to me like something random should make all kinds of crazy stuff. You also seem to be mistaking unanswered questions or wondering why things are the way they are as proof of God.

 

Except people with near death experiences tend to have conflicting accounts of what the after life is about, and we know that brain trauma near death can create many of the hallucinations in near death experiences, and the vast majority of people who temporarily die don't have religious NDEs.

 

That could be a problem yet so far I have not encountered the problems you speak of. Atheists have had their lives turned around after they have a NDE. They got a second chance and were very lucky.

 

Perhaps it is not me making the mistake. Your questions were expected yet kind of presumptive. I do not think dumb luck should make everything similar for instance.

 

I perhaps run counter to main theology of a good many christians but do not see GOD as having created Hitler. Though I am not a Catholic, they present a lot of good people who were not created by GOD yet are still highly regarded in Catholic theology and seem to have even performed miracles.

Jesus was a miracle if you stop to examine him. He worked as a Carpenter. I wonder if his fellow Carpenters realized he could raise from the dead and cure various human illness?

 

We believe that since science to date has not explained how the universe formed from nothing, it is natural to accept that GOD could do this.

 

We LDS believe that Jesus chose to be good and that Satan chose to be evil.

Take a family where one boy is so evil he ends up on death row. Yet his brothers and sisters turn out to be excellent people who harm nobody. Satan simply was that bad seed.

 

It is certainly NOT the case that early life forms contained the information needed to produce the plans and animals we see today.

For example, plants don't have the infomation necessary to express a mammal. And, mammals don't have the information necessary for the machinery of photosynthesis.

So, I'm not sure what you're intending to say here.

 

Sure.

And, since there was a time when science didn't have a proven theory of evolution humans liked to believe that god made each individual form of life ever to exist on earth.

And, since early Christians didn't understand gravity etc., they liked the idea that a god moved the visible elements across the sky - even at one point stopping the sun to allow humans to slaughter each other longer.

We got rain dances, animal sacrifices, etc., probably because sometimes good things happeed afterwards - thus supporting the idea of some god waiting for the fumes of burning flesh.

It has ALWAYS been the case that when humans don't get a quick and easy answer they assume its god. Humans NEVER like to say "I don't know".

That has NOTHING to do with science, obviously. It is ONLY about human nature.

 

That familiy needed an intervention, obviously.

 

There is no scientific consensus that the universe came from nothing. There is also no evidence that God made the universe from nothing, that the universe even came from nothing, or that God was involved at all.

 

Ok then. Who made Hitler?