‘This is the one issue that evolutionists won’t touch with a ten foot pole.’
but it doesn’t faze the theists at all; some unseen, unknowable entity not occupying time or space and not needing to be created itself snapped its fingers and voila, here we are...
Correct. Science is about how. Religion is about why. Science has no explanation for how, and religion needs no explanation for how. As a Christian I confidently say that I have no clue how God did it. The bible only says that he “spoke” it into existence. And that is from writers who thought the earth was flat with a big dome over it where the gods lived.
But I do understand that the more we know, the more we know we don’t know. And, not to put too fine a point on it, the more we know that what we thought we knew turned out to be wrong.
We live in “modern times” now. We really know so much more than we used to. But then, all times were “modern times” at the time. :)
“but it doesn’t faze the theists at all; some unseen, unknowable entity not occupying time or space and not needing to be created itself snapped its fingers and voila, here we are...”
Hence the crux of the issue...what ever can’t be ruled out, no matter how improbable, no matter how psychologically discomfiting, when all other possibilities have been ruled out,such improbabilities are most likely true or they define the pathway to truth.
So why not an unknown entity ungraspable via the scientific method but perhaps intuited?...or as Paul says “In God we live and move and have our being, as some of your POETS have said. Paul is arguing that even gifted poets could “grok”(I use Bradbury’s phrase most deliberately here) God’s existence beyond what science and reason can unearth.
Yet even Paul argues from the very structures seen on Earth and in Heaven that men using reason should be able to intuit and from deduction affirm the existence of God and even from such deductions, derive his statutes and laws “so that none of us has any excuse” when faced with the judgments of God! None of use will be able to say...”oh but Lord I had no idea!”.