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Monday, September 19, 2016

Did God use evolution to create?

No one can deny this as a possibility, but to be an acceptable scientific theory one need to apply a little more rigor -- like by thinking through the logical implications of what we should see in the fossil record is 
God used natural processes such as those of evolution to do his creation.

First, though, let me point out that the idea that God used evolution removes the need for God, and makes him an unnecessary complication in evolutionary theory, and therefore a violation of the scientific rule of avoiding the addition of unnecessary complications.

How could we tell the difference between a fully "natural" process and one that happens under divine direction?  

One might be with the demonstration of something that happened in the history of life that could not possibly have happened naturally.  Many possible such events suggest themselves, but there is always the problem that simply because we don't know exactly what happened does not mean it did not happen naturally.   The evolution of flight or of the eye have been in the past mentioned as such events, but now the evolution of these things is well understood.  In other words, such an approach raises the danger of resort to the "God of the gaps," resorting to God when all that really can be said is, "We don't know." It is like those who resort to alien visits to "explain" UFOs.  

More important, there is the problem that the history of life looks for all the world like a sequence of chance events that after many slips and falls finally resulted in us.  (This is looking at it from the normal creationist anthro-chauvinist perspective.)  Life is a history of extinctions, mainly, with few species having living progeny.  Such imperfection does not fit well with God's perfection, although of  course the problem can be rationalized.

The biggest problem I have is that involving God achieves nothing to help the biologist, and is in fact merely a sop to traditional ideas that date from pre-scientific times.

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