"Look around you, the beauty around you suggests a god exists"Friend's mate said:
For me, the materialist (or reductionist) perspective is very partial, since it omits important questions of consciousness, value and purpose that seem very obviously part of the human world. It seems to me to lack any sympathy with the idea of an objective Ideal of supreme goodness and beauty, towards which human life is orientated at its most basic level, and which is apparent in the intelligibility of the physical world, in the sense of personal presence that can be felt in prayer and contemplation.
The Case For God, Scientists & EvolutionFor Dawkins, believing in evolution ultimately assumes an atheistic outlook, which he teaches with messianic zeal and unassailable certainty. However Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project, and many other prominent biologists, have made the case for belief in God as the best and most satisfying explanation of the way things are. Many philosophers, too, are contemplating "theistic evolution," an idea which predates Darwin, as it has been mentioned in Eastern philosophical writings dating over 3000 years ago. This is the notion that life manifested from inert matter, and that all life, through the process of evolution, is progressing back towards oneness with God, from which all things had manifested.
This means, then, that evolution is more than a blind upward push from below, through the ceaseless threats from environment. Evolution is also a process of reaching upward towards fulfilments yet to be achieved. "The fact that life is capable of evolving to higher levels of awareness," writes Donald Walters, "means that life's highest potential is the central reality, of which the lower forms are as yet but imperfect manifestations. The lowest life forms may be compared, in other words, to the first, tentative brush strokes on a vast, uncompleted canvas."
Science speaks of potential energy. This is what is present on a playground swing, for example, before it is released from the top: though the swing is momentarily motionless, it contains all the energy potential for its downward movement. Life, similarly, contains in its humblest beginnings all the potential for its highest future development?a potential presumably far greater than that realised by mankind up to the present time. Life must, gradually, of its own nature, find its way to higher and higher manifestations of awareness....
This allegory might well be applied to organic evolution. Certainly there is no overt sign of divine intervention evident in the long, tortuous, and apparently random process of natural selection. No conscious goal was required, no omniscient guide to blaze the evolutionary trail. Quite sufficient?and far more marvellous, surely?has been the innate urge of life to experience, to understand, to explore, to enjoy?and, ever more fully, through self-expression, to discover its own highest potential.
God as a creatorFriend's mate said:
The greatest artist is always the one who allows his creations in a sense to "create" themselves, to work out their own destinies, without the imposition of his own predetermined ends and inclinations. If the human creator gives his creations so much scope for self-expression, is it not impious to impute less sensitively to the Cosmic Creator towards His universal handiwork?
Persons who believe in God for good reasons are those who believe that the universe is rational and intelligible; they will also be concerned with the trustworthiness of human reason. They will be those who think that consciousness is a kind of reality that is inexplicable in purely material terms, and that it is a fundamental and irreducible element of reality; those who think that its emergence in animals from a long process of increasing physical complexity and organisation requires explanation in terms of an envisaged goal and intension; those who have some experience of transcendent value in beauty and in morality; those who feel the attraction of an Ideal of truth, beauty and goodness, which is objective; and those, moreover, who wish to penetrate in thought beyond sensory appearances to the hidden reality that lies beneath.
They will not be, as Dawkins would have us believe, those who are deranged, deluded and deceived; or those who have their intellectual capacity hijacked by an infectious, malignant God-virus.
I conclude that, not only do the results of science point towards the Mind of God behind this universe, but the scientific enterprise itself is validated by his existence.
Inevitably, of course, we all have our own biases and presuppositions before we hear anyone's opinions. For the God hypothesis, there are essentially just two options. Either human intelligence ultimately owes its origin to unguided, mindless matter; or there is a Creator. Is it not bizarre that some people claim that it is their intelligence that leads them to prefer the former to the latter?
Will be responding to the above later.
Topic: Any biologists or evolutionists who can check out these claims?