Balance of nature: theological implications (Introduction)

by David Turell , Monday, January 13, 2025, 19:34 (9 days ago) @ dhw

Ozone layer

DAVID: I impost nothing on God. I assume this reality is caused by Him as it appears to us. The method is messy and non-direct, and putting Him in charge changes nothing.

dhw: If he exists, then of course we can assume that he caused this reality. But that does not mean that we were his sole purpose, that he specially designed the 2-billion-year long battle between iodine and oxygen, and then went on to design and cull countless species and ecosystems, solely in order to produce us. Nor does it mean he is all-powerful and all-knowing. These are your “impositions”.

DAVID: Purpose is the result of an analysis of His actions. Did chance contingencies produce our brain? Isn't a guiding mind a better choice?

dhw: I have agreed that the complexities of living organisms (not just our brain) provide a logical case for design. I do not believe that a 2-billion-year battle between iodine and oxygen provides evidence for design or for an all-powerful, all-knowing God whose sole purpose was to produce humans. Your own “analysis” comes up with the proposal that your God is a “messy, cumbersome and inefficient” designer, which is hardly commensurate with your image of him as being all-powerful and all-knowing.

His choice of evolution rather than direct creation means that roundabout creation was required as the best approach.

Root controls

QUOTE: "The study highlights how ABA and auxin, another key hormone, work together to shape root growth angle, providing a potential strategy to develop drought-resistant crops with improved root system architecture."

DAVID: Clearly a designed system to direct root growth. Plants could not have adapted to land without this mechanism available in the beginning.

dhw: Many plants die as a result of drought. The process seems to me to echo the whole history of evolution: some cell communities have the ability to work out means of survival as conditions change, and some don’t. The ability may have been the product of a designing God. But I doubt if a designing God would have decided on the survival or extinction of every individual life form throughout the whole history of evolution. Indeed, some folk would argue that changing conditions (including the winner of the battle between iodine and oxygen) and the survival and extinction of subsequent life forms are simply matters of chance or “luck”, rather than design.

Tell us our brain appeared by chance mutations!! Think of the odds!