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Allison Fink's picture

What does evolution reveal about God and order?

Getting back to motivations for retelling stories: the passage says that it isn’t the evidence that you see around you; you won’t accept the evidence unless you have some idea of a theory to explain the evidence.

Now, I have a lot of philosophy-related questions.

Does God have a reason for creating things?

Does necessity rule the world? Perhaps people can find meaning in that, like when people of a totally unreligious scientific mind said that meaningful things come from blind, unthinking processes.

I think that the principle of evolution means that somehow, God knew that the universe should not be determined, so he left it open. Did he not know how it would turn out? An algorithm is like a computer program; it’s deterministic and you can predict the exact end result if you have enough calculating power in your head. What would be the point of God starting up an algorithm if s/he knew how it would turn out? Why not carry it all out at once? But there are claims by scientists that the universe is not entirely deterministic. Which I don’t understand, but I think it has something to do with consciousness (and modern physics). If evolution  is nondeterministic, it would make sense that God would allow evolution- so that God could allow it to play out for itself. And as a related question, could it be that God is not all knowing, that God makes mistakes but gradually improves creation? And to what degree is creation the most improved? If you say nature gets more and more coherent and complex, is there no limit to the amount of coherence and complexity possible? If it wasn’t known before, does such intelligence develop over time, and how, if nothing can come from nothing? Is mind infinite in the directions its intelligence can take? How can we conceive of infinity without diminishing each one of the pieces of it?

How do we know the true essences of living things that allow for true classification, beyond the arbitrary categories we can choose? When we consider these things, we interpret the universe as coming from the mind of God, and as such having a unifying order to it, but is that just because we have intelligence, so we can’t think of it in any other way? Human intelligence, or Mind, seems to be linked with God, because Mind is what makes sense of the universe, and isn’t it self-evident that the universe has to make sense, and this quality is eternal and omnipresent?

This may be a bit jumbled and undeveloped, but I can think of these ideas more in the future. I like how the article links science and philosophy to really get you to think.  

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