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> They say that they believe God set it up to be purposeless, and that He just knew that it would end up this way ... i.e., with humans.

That's not what I've heard. The way I've heard it is that God either nudged things along... a mutation here, an asteroid there; *or* that he didn;t really care what physical form developed, so long as it was capable of holding a soul. Teh whole thing of man being in God's image *physically* is, I believe, utter nonsnese. Why would an infinite God have a nose, feet and nipples? But a far better case can be made for the "image" being the soul.

Were I to believe such things, I'd hazard that God finally started ensouling humans around 70,000 years ago, when the Toba supervolcanic explosion nearly wiped us out, dropping the planetary population down to a few thousand. Evidence suggests that prior to that, were were really smart primates... but *after* that, we were suddenly far more creative artistically.

The scientific explanation could be that conditions were so bad, only the smart and clever ones survived and propogated; but a religious take is obviously possible as well. *Perhaps* Adam and Eve were "ensouled" (or whatever it's called) in the months/years prior to Toba, they were living the good life in some African paradise, they pissed off God somehow, and he poked his finger into the volcano making it go "blam." Makes as much sense as anything else in religion, I suppose.

Hmm. Maybe I should expand on this. Get myself a nice suit and a hair-helmet, a vapid blond with big hair and too much makeup, and get me a TV show. Seems to be big money available there...

The scientific explanation could be that conditions were so bad, only the smart and clever ones survived and propogated; but a religious take is obviously possible as well. *Perhaps* Adam and Eve were "ensouled" (or whatever it's called) in the months/years prior to Toba, they were living the good life in some African paradise, they pissed off God somehow, and he poked his finger into the volcano making it go "blam." Makes as much sense as anything else in religion, I suppose.

Hmm. Maybe I should expand on this. Get myself a nice suit and a hair-helmet, a vapid blond with big hair and too much makeup, and get me a TV show. Seems to be big money available there...

And get a lawyer.
That's too close to the Scientology shtick. You'll be sued for copyright infringement.

In 1995, the official Position Statement of the American National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) accurately states the general understanding of major science organizations and educators:

The diversity of life on earth is the outcome of evolution: an unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process of temporal descent with genetic modification that is affected by natural selection, chance, historical contingencies and changing environments.

Or in the words of the famous evolutionist, George Gaylord Simpson, "Man is the result of a purposeless, and natural process that did not have him in mind."

How do they know the process was unsupervised?

How do they know the process was mindless?

How do they know the process was purposeless?

Their statements are problematic in that they are unscientific. It cannot be proven that evolutionary processes are "purposeless" or that humans were "not in mind." Science cannot demonstrate these assumptions either way ... and that's the problem with their position. They become proponents of a religion of atheism; I say religion because their conclusion is NOT science, it is faith ... just as much as OUR conclusion is faith. Clearly, their definition is diametrically opposed to any concept of a personal creator being involved in the evolutionary process.