Nothing wrong with a religious conviction. I'm glad you see it for what it is.
We both pick the explanation that we like.
You like the idea that inanimate matter can organize itself into complex creatures.
I like the idea that I've been designed and placed here for a reason by my Creator.
My objection is to the claim that one explanation is objective while the other is not.
Stan, my intended meaning was not that it's a religious conviction, but you knew that. I don't agree that we're simply picking the explanations that we like. The computer you're reading this on is possible only because our understanding of how electricity behaves on very small scales is accurate to a staggering degree of precision, and that knowledge was not found in the Bible.
It was arrived at by observation and experiment, the findings of which you accept and readily make use of in your everyday life, only disputing when they contradict the Bible. Not for any good reason, just because you are personally convinced by the same centuries upon centuries of accumulated apologetics any sufficiently old religion has stockpiled for the purpose of convincing you that it's anything other than what it is.
You can see this very plainly about people in other religions, though they cannot see it about themselves. Nobody on the inside of one of these things ever sees it that way or they would leave. From the inside, it just looks like unassailable reality. Fish who do not see the water they are in. Have an epiphenal moment of self awareness, will you?
While I'm at it, I'll tell you something else about computers. You're a sim guy, you'll appreciate this. While it is indeed possible to set every variable just as you want it and set it going, there's an altogether different sort of sim which does not require such careful tweaking. If ever you have seen fractal artwork generated by computers, however complex and detailed they may appear, in truth they were generated procedurally from extremely simple instructions.
So simple, in fact, that they can occur in nature as interactions between individuals of a species and their environment. When we look at living organisms, what type of structures do we see in their bodies? In the central nervous system, for instance. In the lungs, or the cardiopulminary system. If we look very closely at the structure of blood vessels will we not find that their arrangement precisely obeys fractal mathematics?
Will we not find fibonnaci spirals, likewise, not only in our own bodies such as our thumbprints and distribution of hair on our scalps, but in aloe plants, in pineapples, in sunflowers and all manner of other living things?
You can take the lazy cognitive shortcut and say "Something really smart designed all of this!" but you're missing the bigger picture. The type of complexity we see in engineered objects is very, very distinct from the kind that we see in nature. The kind in nature "just happens" to be the only sort of complexity that can be generated from starting conditions sufficiently simple to naturally occur.
Now, my intent with all of this is not to belittle you. On the contrary if I didn't think you were a smart guy, I wouldn't bother. If anything, though we may forever disagree about this, I still appreciate that your heart is in the right place.
You think you're trying to help save me from hell. If I believed what you do, I'd probably do the same thing. That's what it's designed to make you do, try to convert people. So it can spread. Nevertheless, it's the thought that counts and the thought is a sweet one. That means something to me and is why I have never begrudged attempts to evangelize to me about Jesus. I just wish when they read this passage, or this one, they understood what he was talking about.
No belittling assumed. :)
And yes, I am trying to enter a burning building and rescue someone who doesn't want to leave. Stipulated.
I was in the the ENT doctor's office the other day looking with the eyes of an engineer at a poster on the wall like this:
I studied the diagram notations as it described the purpose of every component in what amounts to an integrated inertial navigation and sonar sensor.
Inside that cochlea coil are fine hairs that sense the vibrations in the fluid caused by sounds transmitted through specially shaped boned connected to a tympanic membrane that compression waves move in response to distant sounds. Each of those hairs stimulates nerves that route signals to a part of the brain that contains a digital signal processor that translates it all into balance and ability to discriminate frequencies at the rate that Jimmy Hendrix can produce them on his guitar.
All of these components need to come into existence at the same time to generate any survival advantage whatsoever. Random mutations producing just one of these components at a time die out because they are useless. (And in fact, each component has components that all must exist concurrently for it to be useful to the larger system.)
Things like this are plenty good enough to bias me in favor of intelligent design. So when I get reports from eyewitnesses to supernatural events, I don't have any bias against the stories they tell.
I guess it comes down to which outrageous belief we each consider to be the most outrageous. No way do I buy the story line that the evolution of such systems was not guided by intelligence.
Note: in order for things to be "growable" they have to use design patterns that use the processes you describe. But I'm not buying the claim that highly complex functional systems of subsystems of subsystems happened by accident.
The line of argument you're employing, is a common one among evolutionists, and indeed, googling it reveals your own argument to be one of the more prevalent forms.
Unguided evolution has been around long enough for its apologists to have plausible stock answers for every argument.
Still not buying it.
No, I don't evaluate their claims first, I evaluate their credibility. If they are credible, then their claims are interesting to me.
More than half the Quran is abrogated - that's where Muhammad changed his earlier message from Allah to something that contradicted it. Not good for a perfect book that exists in perfect form in heaven. Muhammad claims that the Scriptures are corrupted and changes every story to make decedents of Ishmael the protagonist instead of decedents of Isaac. It is clear from the Dead Sea Scrolls that those scriptures were not corrupted dating back 900 years before Muhammad. End of story.
Joseph Smith lost credibility many ways but the two slam dunks are these:
(1) As he explains in the first preface to the Book of Mormon, someone stole his original translation of a big chunk of the "golden plates" and he couldn't/wouldn't simply retranslate them ... presumably because there was no other copy except in his memory which if not able to match the stolen text perfectly, should they emerge, would prove that he had no golden plates.
(2) He grabbed an opportunity to translate a book of Egyptian hieroglyphics into the "Book of Abraham" full of racist teachings. Later, Archeologists used the Rosetta stone to translate it and found it to be the "Book of Breathings" a burial manual.
End of story.
On the other hand, the Bible collects tons of evidence from many sources that Jesus performed thousands of miracles every day in front of large crowds. These crowds became his followers and were present in Christian communities all around the mediterranean in the first generation.
Joseph and Muhammad and their followers used their "revelations" to claim earthy power, wealth and glory. Jesus and His followers did not.
There is no comparison.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_cosmology
https://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/febible.htm
So we are right back where I started.
The Bible is a collection of all known eyewitness accounts so of course there are no others or they would be included too.
I said I found the Bible to be convincing and understand that others do not want to find it so. I stated that that was Jesus' plain intention so that people who don't want to believe it can weed themselves out.
My only job is to encourage people to read what is written and make their own choice.
Then I can shake off the dust of this conversation and move on, having done my duty.
Constantly pointing to the existence of counterfeit twenties doesn't say anything about whether a real one will buy you a snow cone.
Every single one of your points designed to cast doubt has a parallel explanation that builds faith. The possible alternative motives/explanations you propose do not prove that the stated motives/explanations are not true.
I will grant that your points are alternative explanations of what happened. So what? You have no more proof than I have of which is correct. It all comes down to how we each choose to view the evidence.
The explanation that the Bible gives when you assimilate it all is that one third of creation rebelled, wanting to run things themselves rather that submit to God's authority. So He is giving them that chance. You can see the poor results all around you. This will continue until they crash and burn the whole planet. Then Jesus will show up having proved to the rest of creation over 6000 years that the rebels were wrong.
The "believe" criteria is the simplest and most elegant way of sorting out rebels from servants. Every single event, action, and verse in the Bible has at least two interpretations, one suspicious and negative and another eagerly embracing the good news at face value.
You keep choosing the wrong ones and somehow think that proves that the right ones don't exist.
Look back over you posts. Every single point is simply substituting your most suspicious, negative explanation for the plainly evident, positive explanations that Christians have held over 20 Centuries.
Again, that's by design. You prove yourself a rebel every single time you substitute an unproven negative alternative explanation for our unproven positive beliefs.
I'm sure you can do that for all 30,000 verses. Without one shred of evidence that your negative explanations are more true than our positive ones.
That's why this conversation is pointless. You are determined to choose the unproven explanation that frees you to adopt secular beliefs of your own choosing. You don't have a servant's heart, you don't have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and you are slamming every door opened to you as fast as you can think up an excuse not to believe.
So be it.