Theistic Evolution is wide-enough belief, especially with Protestants.
Something exists. Therefore, on of the following 3 must hold: “one or more things exists or have existed which were not a consequence of another thing existing”, “an infinite regress of things existing as a consequence of other things”, “a cycles of consequences”.
The purported absurdity of life arising by chance is not about life existing, but about it arising by chance as a consequence of other non-living things.
The idea that god coming from nothing is absurd, well, that absurdity seemingly has to apply somewhere, as all 3 cases of the trichotomy above seem around as absurd? Eventually something has to be without explanation, whether it be a thing or a chain or cycle of things.
Or, were you not aware that most people who believe that God exists believe that God is the first cause?
Apparently you weren’t aware of that, because you said something about magic and stardust??
Yes, wide-bosomed Gaia, foundation of us all, this research is about the manner in which She did it, if it was one birth or two.
Or is that the joke and I'm missing it?
Which one? There are so many to choose from...
And what created that God? I know it's turtles all the way down but still want to know.
Personally, I don't believe in any religions. They were all developed before we had a much clearer idea of how our world works and there's just too much folklore mixed in with actual, yet primitive, philosophical discussions to abide by any of it. But like with the simulation theory, we have no way to know what exists outside our time and space so you shouldn't worry. If there is some bored extra dimensional teenager simulating our universe on their GPU, it ultimately doesn't matter because we'll never know.
What we learn from these philosophies is that God is necessarily the author of life and love, but as well hatred and destruction. Worth noting that the latter are most (but not exclusively) expressed in human conduct. Among all animals humans have the most developed ability to decide how to act. That ability is not absolute, often enough logic or reasoning is bypassed and emotion rules.
Naturally cognition is not unbounded, we are limited by constraints of our construction. It means aspects of the universe are unknowable, we can't know what we're missing.
But knowing what we can know is an obligation of our privileged existence. As knowledge expands it exposes the utter complexity of all things emerging from common fundamental processes.
Seeing what is seen, a human may for a moment get a glimpse of the hand that binds everything together. That's a gift if there ever was one.
Argument by ridicule is a fallacy.
> even more so than thinking that a computer chip was created by chance erosion of a silicone wafer in exactly the right pattern.
But, as I'm sure you have been told many times, that's an absurd strawman, and suggests that you didn't read TFA or anything else that discusses how life may have arisen, including any of the other comments here. Life didn't spring up fully formed, it developed in stages.
> As I see it
I can't think of anything less compelling.
> life was clearly designed by God.
That is semantically incoherent, as well as being a violation of HN guidelines ("Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle.")