I have been thinking about a particular thought experiment for the last few days. Essentially, my idea is an analogy for Intelligent Design. I won’t comment here how I feel about this or other things, but I figured I would share an idea and see how it is received.
I bought a Zaxby’s salad the other day and as I added my salad dressing in a sporadic way, I realized that I had the option of dumping all of the dressing in one spot and distribute it with my fork later. My technique that day and others has been to dispense the dressing across my salad in such a way as to limit the effort required to get an even coating of dressing across the entire salad. If I were to dump all of the dressing in one spot, I could eventually achieve even dressing coverage via stirring the salad, but I will always opt for the more efficient way.
I hazard to continue the analogy and close in the logic as it might relate to Intelligent Design. Are we living in a universe that had the spark of life and ability to adapt poured into a puddle to be stirred vigorously or were these attributes distributed in a way that would maybe lead to the development of a species in a much more efficient and predictable way?
2 replies on “Pondering”
My whole take on “theistic evolution” has always been, why bother? Why would God take millions of years of guiding evolution to create humans and finally blessing them with a soul when they reached the desired evolutionary point, when he could create humans fully formed right off the bat? Even if you ignore the creation account in Genesis or dismiss it as metaphorical, I don’t see how the existence of God and the theory of evolution (as the origin of life) can be compatible. It’s one or the other, either God created Man or evolution did. It can’t be both.
Theistic evolution, in my opinion, reveals the tendency of well-meaning Christians to adopt anti-Biblical ideas and try to make them fit in with Christianity because they do not know the arguments and evidence to disprove evolution (as a theory for the origin of life, of course I acknowledge that natural selection can cause variations within “kinds” to become more common).
Both require forethought. A “spark of life” would be something outside of natural phenomena, unless atoms are alive, and the notion of “distributed,” by definition, requires an outside agent. Until that is, a head of lettuce is picked pre-slathered with ranch… then all bets are off.