No direct hand.
The point is, one can accept every facet of evolution, and also believe that the reason it all works like that is because God wanted it to work like that, and those two positions are not in any way in tension with each other.
Well, once you include god, who knows what the motivations are? But with regards to the low-entropy singularity at the start of the Big Bang, that’s exactly right. It is vastly more probable (unimaginably so, in fact) that the entropy would be just low enough to support life. There’s certainly no need for billions of galaxies; one would be enough. And really, the Milky Way is vastly bigger than it needs to be to produce the conditions for our solar system to form with the right combination of metals, etc.
In fact, you can follow this logic all the way down, where the most probable anthropic universe is the one where you’re just a single brain floating in space that happened to be assembled by chance particle collisions. Who knows, maybe it’s actually true…
Well, sure, because the latter position is meaningless and unfalsifiable; it cannot contradict any objective truth.
I mentioned in an earlier post that I’m using the term god in a very different sense than the Abrahamic and other western religions. I’m not referring to Yahweh, and whatever the force is, it’s almost certainly not omnipotent. I previously started a thread on infinities in nature, and from what I can tell none exist in the real world, and probably wouldn’t in any other universe either. Omnipotence would imply an infinity of power, which I don’t believe in. But some force or another had to create the universe. In this one we have gravity, electromagnetic, and strong and weak nuclear forces. None of those are capable of causing Big Bangs as far as my understanding of them goes, so I presume it must be some other force that doesn’t exist in this universe. I simply chose to use the term god to describe that force.
All that being said, I don’t see how that force, whatever we choose to call it, has any kind of sentient or sapient connection with life on our planet. You could argue, as you have, that it’s a direct conclusion from the arguments I laid out, and you would be correct, but I believe it’s a trivial conclusion. The force that created the Big Bang is responsible for our evolution in the same sense that the supernova that created the heavy elements found on Earth is responsible for our evolution. It’s true, but it doesn’t imply any sort of religious causation.
ETA: That’s why I use a lowercase g for god. I’d group the god I’m talking about with gravity, electromagnetism, and the strong and weak nuclear forces, rather than grouping it with Yahweh, Brahma, Ahura Mazda, Zeus, etc.
You’re just redefining god as some unknown force that may have started the universe. A non-sentient force is not part of the definition of a god or gods.
Yes, that’s what I’ve done. The main reason is that the word god comes closer to describing “an unknown force capable of creating a universe / that did crate our universe” than any other word we have in the English language. To be clear, I think this force is almost certainly an impersonal natural force, no different than gravity and electromagnetism. There was no sentience or sapience, no thinking “I’m going to create this new universe with physical laws that just so happen to allow for the evolution of humans on a planet that I specially picked out for them” anymore than something called Gravity thought “I’m going to pull this apple down onto the head of Isaac Newton.” It’s just some force that we don’t yet understand, for the obvious reason that it doesn’t exist in our current universe (as far as we know) and so is not really amenable to scientific investigation on a practical level.
I don’t know what you might be doing for yourself by using “god” with that definition, but you’re not doing yourself any favors in using it in conversation with others. You’re just confusing the conversation.
I just happen to think the word fits. It’s similar to how the physicist Leon Lederman wanted to term the Higgs boson the god particle. Although I will take note that his idea, as stated in the wikipedia article, was also not very popular with his fellow physicists. It basically boils down to me thinking it sounds like the coolest term we could use to describe that force.
Sure, but again, the point isn’t, “Religion is dumb in general,” the point is “Republicans have more people who reject scientific fact in favor of personal belief.”