Could be everybody’s listening on account of nobody wants to draw attention to themselves. It’s one thing to want to be Cortez, but can you be sure you won’t be Montezuma? But there was a Cortez so maybe….

PS: Theory is a set of hypotheses which collects empirical data that can be interpreted as supporting the hypothesis set. Multiverse concepts are not quite up to Theory status, but more than hypothesis.

Good essay. I’ve been thinking of how to make a case that irreducible complexity is irrefutable. Sort of as if I were a lawyer–perish the thought–getting paid for it.
Howsomever, the evolutionists are stuck with the inevitability of one last molecule getting stuck into an unimaginably complex series of molecules and turning it from organic chemistry to life. As one theologian said, you can have evolution. I’ve got the last molecule getting slotted in just right, by God.
After that, evolution is a given and not even hard to understand.

The Creationists generally fail to grasp that their beliefs directly undermine their own faith in God.

Bear with me:

It seems inherently obvious that, if God wanted us to KNOW He existed, that He could, quite easily, part the skies above us, reach down with His Godly Hand, twit us aside the head, and say “I’m HERE ya big dummy!”

He does not — so clearly, He wishes — for whatever of His reasons, for us to BELIEVE based on FAITH alone, not on KNOWLEDGE.

So, assuming God to be COMPETENT, He would not have created a universe which required Him to exist in order for IT to exist. By that we would KNOW He exists, and not need Faith.

Ergo — there must be an alternative explanation which lies within the bounds of man’s understanding, one not involving God — for why and how the universe came to be. You cannot Prove God by reason and logic and science.

To presume anything else is to presume God is incompetent, that He left this stupid loophole there which proves His Existence.

Our theories of stellar cosmology, of evolution, and so forth, are the current “best guesses” as to what that built-in alternative explanation is.

They don’t say anything about the existence of God — because they are not related to FAITH but to observable FACTS and reasonable deductions made from those.

Faith and Science do not reject or refute one another — they COMPLEMENT one another — each deals with things outside the others’ arena of expertise. Some people Just Don’t Get This.

“Creation Science” is a misnomer and a contradiction in terms. Creationism is about FAITH, not about SCIENCE, and anyone attempting to retrofit or force-feed it into a scientific form does not grasp what SCIENCE is at all.

Evolution does not say one solitary thing about the existence of God. It merely says that either God made things “this way”, or, alternately, that He created everything with evidence to that end built into it.

As far as what evolution says about the impossibility of life, that’s a ridiculous assertion based on a failure to understand both science AND the mechanism being described.

My favorite is the million monkeys analogy, claiming life is too improbable to exist.

It fails to grasp that the million monkeys analogy is VERY high probability if you apply a CORRECTIVE mechanism to edit the monkeys’ failures out — that is, if they type something which is NOT Shakespeare, and the typewriter backs up and eliminates it, then the time it takes them to write Shakespeare becomes surprisingly short.

And evolution’s processes are that corrective mechanism.

In fact, there are ample examples of how crappy things become “standard issue” because of bad but “acceptible” design choices getting locked in early on.

Human feet are designed to be used as monkeys use them, sitting on your haunches using your hands for balance a large percent of the time. By walking upright, “flatfootedness” becomes a problem which it is not for monkeys.

The human sinuses, due to our postures, and our habit of sleeping on our backs, lead to the sinuses draining inside, rather than outside of the body. This makes humans subject to an array of respiratory ailments that no other species is subject to.

The squid’s eye is a masterpiece of functional design, and puts the one spread throughout most of the planet’s species to shame. Yet that design is “good enough”, and so became the predominant one due to “early adoption”.

Did God make the world? I assume so. But I don’t have any idea HOW he did it, nor does anyone else. But the evidence HE placed there is that it was done by the mechanism of evolution, even if we don’t fully grasp the entirety of it.

If we haven’t evolved by that point to not being planet-bound, we’re doomed anyway.

Interesting isn’t it? This is already putting some key constraints on the likelyhood of finding sentient life.

“intelligent life is very hard to come by.”

Amen!

Near zero in D.C.