Rainboy, God bless you, I think you have given us both a chance to say things that wanted to be said and you certainly drew things out of me that I'd been too distracted to express before. It's always worthwhile making a case for God's love, and that is what we have both been doing in our ways. So we can round off this particular thread with some happiness.

Evolution and its degree of predestination. Interesting speculation. Evolution connects very directly to some other natural developmental processes, especially plate tectonics, which causes continents to drift around and produces mountains and earthquakes.

Before the puzzle came along about how much direction God exerted in evolution, there was the puzzle of how much direction God exerted over plate tectonics. Not that people had that concept at the time; but the piece of the puzzle that they had ahold of was wondering to what extent God caused earthquakes. This was especially poignant when the 1755 Lisbon earthquake destroyed one of the main Christian cities of the world, on a religious holiday, with specially heavy damage to the churches. Quote from Wikipedia below.

The earthquake had wide-ranging effects on the lives of the populace and intelligentsia. The earthquake had struck on an important Catholic holiday and had destroyed almost every important church in the city, causing anxiety and confusion amongst the citizens of a staunch and devout Catholic city and country, which had been a major patron of the Church. Theologians and philosophers would focus and speculate on the religious cause and message, seeing the earthquake as a manifestation of the anger of God.

The earthquake and its fallout strongly influenced the intelligentsia of the European Age of Enlightenment. The noted writer-philosopher Voltaire used the earthquake in Candide and in his Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne ("Poem on the Lisbon disaster"). Voltaire's Candide attacks the notion that all is for the best in this, "the best of all possible worlds", a world closely supervised by a benevolent deity. The Lisbon disaster provided a salutary counterexample. As Theodor Adorno wrote, "[t]he earthquake of Lisbon sufficed to cure Voltaire of the theodicy of Leibniz" (Negative Dialectics 361). In the later twentieth century, following Adorno, the 1755 earthquake has sometimes been compared to the Holocaust as a catastrophe that transformed European culture and philosophy.

Now, I suppose where the chips fall with me is that I don't think it's likely that God deliberately stage-managed the Lisbon earthquake. That being the case, even the fact that God let it happen to a Christian city seems to show that plate tectonics was being pretty much allowed to do its thing. Now, I know one could argue this many ways -- sure, Portugal was involved in the slave trade so perhaps it was wrath, or maybe God wanted to start the enlightenment and produce secular humanism as a trial of faith, who knows? But it does seem a little elliptical of God to destroy God's own dedicated churches on a holy day, along with much loss of life.

Putting that together with all the other hideous things that happen to innocent people, and one begins to think that (as is put forward in the book "When bad things happen to good people" by Harold Kushner, though he takes it too far) perhaps God allows natural systems and people quite a lot of freedom. Not that God is totally hands-off... I mean, I have had prayers of my own answered remarkably directly and sometimes not about small matters. My feeling is that the freedom we have as being with free will is predicated on our living in an environment where an analogy of that freedom also goes through everything. Our free will is part of the created condition of this cosmos, not a single solitary phenomenon in a world where everything else is stage-managed closely in the divine control room.

Well, then, if God is arguably not pointing the finger for every earthquake, what about seemingly random evolutionary events? Were mosquitoes and tapeworms predestined or did they arise out of constructive evolutionary chance (or, alternatively, out of deviltry? but there seems to be little role for the devil in the creation of nature).

As with the earthquakes, it's a lot easier to envisage items like Mycobacterium tuberculosis, agent of TB, evolving under their own steam and afflicting victims ad libertas than it is to imagine God sucking tuberculosis out of the predestination straw and then using it to eliminate most of the indigenous population of North America just when many were newly converted to Christianity.

So yes, look at a human and you see, for example, some air holes, and a couple of these often exude green slime to repel dust and parasites, but they tend to do it to excess in some people, especially when plants are having sex nearby (lots of pollen grains in the air) -- is this literally the image of God?

I think we are "created in God's image" in bearing sufficient intelligence to recognize God and to use our free will deliberately to -- on a very small scale -- co-create the ongoing form of the universe.

And I suspect we are not alone in this... all those planets out there... would it be such a surprise if there were many other equally intelligent life forms out there? They may be indefinitely strange in shape and appearance, not to mention culture and not to mention sexuality, if any. If there were such intelligent beings, would God abandon them, preferring only us? It seems unlikely. Would God tell us about them? No, it seems scripture is not a natural history textbook by any means... God hasn't seen fit to dole out the secrets of science to us in sacred texts. (in fact, there is a lot of popular pseudoscience there, with stars falling onto the ground like figs and so on.)

The human body is full of evolutionary anomalies, like the appendix (problem-causing remnant of an organ our biological relatives use but we do not, the caecum) and the wisdom teeth. How much of it answers a predestined "God's plan?"

In fact, we don't know, and any percentage you could name could be correct. I certainly wouldn't argue against the notion that God is capable of predestination. The thing is, though, the existence of the sexual variations we've been discussing (homosexuality, transsexuality, intermediate gender-hermaphroditism and so on) are very consistent with the general scheme of biological variation, and this makes it very much look as if human sexuality, like that of fish and trees and mushrooms, is a regular product of evolution. Well, there is no question a loving God would have made the conditions in which life could emerge and life forms could reproduce, and there is good evidence that God will manifest a loving interaction with at least one species that is capable of comprehending such an interaction (therefore why not others as well, if they exist?). Why should God then not support ongoing human reproduction and good marital relations as part of God's general communication instructing us how to use our intelligence and free will in a loving way? And yet, that would certainly not encumber non-reproductive people with the necessity to violate both their sexual nature and their loving nature and not take part in the loving relations that biological affinity and God's love have made possible for them. Holiness is our responsibility to love with all our hearts, minds, souls and strengths, and same sex-loving people will do that, in part, by loving a God-given help-meet of the same sex.

(And why, after all this talk about biology doing its own thing, do I talk about one's partner as being a "God-given help meet?" Because I believe that as part of God's information about love, the holy spirit will help us to recognize the right person for us when we encounter that person.)

In the case of my partner, I thank and praise God for every hug I can give him, every second I hear his wonderful voice, every thought that comes his way including the ones that afflict me at times (sometimes unnecessarily, sometimes with justice, lol), every look he gives and every breath he takes.

I wish it to all of you and if it happens to be with a young boy with whom you cannot exercise your sexuality, may God's love still be poured out on you in every loving gesture and word.