(September 8, 2022 at 8:59 am)Ahriman Wrote:(September 8, 2022 at 8:39 am)Jehanne Wrote: I think that you do not wish to experience some cognitive dissonance that may occur by considering some ugly facts about reality. Some scholars claim that God "used evolution" to bring about life and Us, but, as everyone who has studied evolution knows, evolution is simply change over time, the frequency of alleles changing within a population across time & space. Modern evolutionary science has its foundations in Thomas Malthus, who influenced Charles Darwin (and, later on, Adolf Hitler), and Darwin (and others) recognized that more individuals are born than can be sustained by their environment, and hence, some individuals possessing certain traits that lead to reproduction are "selected" to survive, passing those traits down to succeeding generations, while others perish, often in infancy or shortly thereafter. It is the random mutations that occur in the germ line of individuals, most of which are either deleterious or benign, with some being beneficial, that allow the gradual modification of alleles that allow certain individuals to thrive in their environment, out-competing not only members of their own species, but different species who may be using the same resources (food, water, tree bark, etc.) as them in their same environment.Not trying to be rude, and I did read the whole thing, but did you have a point?
The grotesque infants who are born, either due to a generic mutation in the germ line of one or both of their parents or some other in utero environment insult, certainly deserve our compassion, but, such infants have been born among mammals since they/we evolved over 200 millions years ago. Such infants will not survive to reproductive age; as such, the deleterious mutations, if any, that they received from one or both of their parents will not get passed down to succeeding generations. These infants have been "selected against" in the process of Darwinian natural selection.
If this is how God "does things", then, that's fine, but, that's not how I would design my creation, but, with "God", one can make whatever claims that one wants to, and that's where religion enters the realm of economics and Geo-politics, gerrymandering, etc.
You don't like to consider disconfirming evidence, the antithesis of modern science.