Hi DS211, it is disturbing on the face of it. However the Christian view of not reading Genesis literally has been around for millennia, well before the modern understanding of evolution.
On the point of natural selection not requiring guidance from supernatural forces, one has to read between the lines here. The reason is that all sorts of processes don’t require intervention in nature. Rain for instance is a process caused by many factors of nature ranging from gravity, to the melting and freezing point of H20 and so on. In turn rain itself causes erosion and other processes of nature.
Because the nature of processes themselves seems to be dependent on other processes before it, it can be tempting to think that the need for intelligence is surplus to requirements. Of course when it comes to a specific process amid the countless ones in nature, it is true than no direct intervention, meddling or help is required. An ice cube doesn’t need help in melting after all because the factors required for this process are already there but where did they come from? Is it possible to trace back all processes to a fundamental point?
A computer program can be described as a process and some sophisticated software can even simulate natural selection to solve an industrial problem for example. However the information for this program and the hardware on which to run it was the result of intelligence. Any design that comes from the program itself is really information that is either in the program, which has to have a programmer of course, or the hardware which has to have a builder or a combination of the two.
Nature is far more complex than the example above but it is by no means proven that the processes of evolution didn’t come at some point from an intelligent mind. If one however isolates a single process of nature and points at it and says that such a process produces this clever result, but didn’t require any intervention and intelligence then that someone is making a misleading statement by obscuring the issues. First of all intervention and intelligence are not really equivalent terms. Something can be designed as with a machine like a car for instance, but not require intervention after the initial manufacture. As well as this, isolating a single process in the car like fire for instance and then saying it doesn’t need intelligence is misleading, because it ignores all the surroundings context of the car itself which did.
These are simple metaphors to get some of the issues over but nature is far more complex but it has not been proven than the whole machine and processes of the universe did not at some point require intelligence. The problem with certain brands of Christianity is its leaning towards literalism and assuming they know Gods mind as well as he does. However there is hope for the theist.
