Question about creationism

[anvi]

Of course it's possible for believers to embrace both science and faith.  Religious traditions frequently reinterpret or revise their cosmologies in the light of other views or discoveries, and this is all perfectly fine.  Science doesn't disprove the existence of God as God can be theologically conceived in a number of ways either.  So, assuming one has faith, making that faith consistent with developing knowledge about natural processes is not a difficult task.

But as a philosophical matter, I'd put the question of creationism a bit differently.  My version of the question be this:  Outside of the act of faith or the testimony of scriptural traditions, what evidence do we have the God created either the universe or any species of living beings? 

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

Creationism is an attempt to satisfy the question of origin. So is the Big bang cosmology.  Yet neither is wholly satisfying philosophically.  If there is a creator, how he come to be?  If one assumes that the universe spontaneously came into being out of nothingness, where did the nothingness come from?  Neither theory really provides a solution, nor do I perceive a way for us to comprehend a solution, even if provided by direct revelation from a being that can comprehend a solution.  The Big Bang model provides us with a model that fairly well fits the observational data we have on the physical universe, yet it doesn't really get us any closer to an answer to the question of where, how, and why we ultimately came into being.

[anvi]

I suspect though that the most important dimension of creationist views is that they offer some sort of answer to "why" the universe and we came into being, whereas the Big Bang theory or other theories of origin that don't invoke divinity ultimately lay the "why" question aside, deeming it unknowable in any ultimate sense.  It's quite natural, and culturally encouraged, for us to want to know the meaning and significance of our origins, and not just their mechanics.  But maybe we don't need to go back that far, maybe we don't necessarily need "metaphysical genealogies," in order to find meaning and significance in our lives, since so many aspects of our lives themselves are meaningful.  Absent any satisfying answer to the "why" question, if we're just talking about the physical origins, I think there is something to be said for sticking to the physical evidence. 

[afleitch]

I suspect though that the most important dimension of creationist views is that they offer some sort of answer to "why" the universe and we came into being, whereas the Big Bang theory or other theories of origin that don't invoke divinity ultimately lay the "why" question aside, deeming it unknowable in any ultimate sense.  It's quite natural, and culturally encouraged, for us to want to know the meaning and significance of our origins, and not just their mechanics.  But maybe we don't need to go back that far, maybe we don't necessarily need "metaphysical genealogies," in order to find meaning and significance in our lives, since so many aspects of our lives themselves are meaningful.  Absent any satisfying answer to the "why" question, if we're just talking about the physical origins, I think there is something to be said for sticking to the physical evidence.  

I tend to agree with your reasoning here and have voiced this myself. The universe does not care about our inherent curiousity about our ourselves. It does not care whether we study it or not, it does not function specifically to aid us, pleasure us, amuse us or destroy us. It follows it's laws. Ultimately that same sense of curiousity drives us to find out more about our surroundings but that journey is also tainted by the over-reaching 'why'; a relic of our evolutionary and cultural focus on human self-importance; our designation of all events from a casual hello from a neighbour, to the actions of the weather and the movement of the stars as all being 'actors' in the human drama. Some things just are.

We are here because we are here. Life is a process and not necessarily a condition of which you must constantly seek a diagnosis as to why you have it. You don't 'have life' as such. You do life. You are life. For me the spiritual aspect of this is very measured in that the 'you' part of you; what you see, how you think, how you ponder and taste, is your brain. When your brain can no longer sustain the electrochemical patterns that make up your consciousness, the 'you' part dies. And just as the 'flame' part of a candle when it is extinguished doesn't shuffle off to 'candle heaven' but dissipates it's energy as thermal noise, so too do we. Our energy and our matter is recycled into the body of the universe.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

How do you know that the universe doesn't care?  Has it told you to stop bothering it with your speculations?  (Altho if it did, that would be evidence that it cared enough to be bothered by us, which would be care, just not the kind of care people have been hoping for.)

You talk about human self-importance is wrong, yet you assume that because the universe does not act in a recognizably human manner to our probing of it, that it doesn't care about us one way or the other.  To expect the universe, or if one wishes to get religious, to expect God, to act as if ey were another human bloke with a different physical makeup if ey are going to act at all is certainly an example of human self-importance.

[afleitch]

How do you know that the universe doesn't care?  Has it told you to stop bothering it with your speculations?

The universe does not care whether I think about the meaning of life, or the person next to me is thinking about kittens, or the person across from me wishes they had never been born, or the boy next to him wishes Betelgeuse would explode soon because the supernova would look 'really cool'. Nothing we say or do to try and appease or test the universe has any affect on the temper or temperance of the observable universe because we have absolutely no evidence that it has ever responded to any thought or action committed by any human being. Nor do we have any evidence that it is sentient (except the possible future hypothetical of the Boltzmann brain)

There is some salt in my kitchen. There is no evidence that it cares about me (though it really should) I struggle to determine whether my cat cares about me or at what point any instinct of concern will kick in from my estranged aunt.

It is wise to assume that a 'thing', even a living thing shows no concern, whether benevolent or malicious, for you as an individual until it demonstrates otherwise.

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The alternative to the universe not caring about us is caring about us. That means caring about the decisions we make and our physical and spiritual well-being. That is a projection of human self importance of the highest grandeur.