Greta wrote:So there are these real patterns in nature that are more observed than shaped by the senses.
Yes. And this is where mathematical descriptions are often so powerful in showing the similarities in form across phenomena that previously might have appeared to be completely unrelated.
It's what makes reality work - the imperfect homogeneity of fields resulting in relative areas of concentration becoming more so and, as they become more relatively dense, they exert ever greater influence on their environments.
Yes. That's positive feedback - any situation in which the result of a process tends to magnify the force that leads to the process - the opposite of a swinging pendulum. It applies to diverse fields from the gravitational collapse of interstellar dust clouds to the accumulation of power by the rich.
These areas of concentration interact, accidentally competing in a battle to persist. Once the dust has settled, "winners" emerge and they exert influence on any less massive entities around them to the point of systematisation. This dynamic appears at all scales, in just about every arena.
Yes.
Another such objective dynamic, not entirely subject to perception or imagination, is branching. Branching is also found everywhere, from trees, to rivers, to mind maps, to social communities, to microbial communities, to the cosmic web, to the spread of coronavirus.
Yes, and mathematically that one is represented by fractals.
On a trivial level, the powers attributed to God by religious literalists are skin to those of the father of a boy who says, 'Oh yeah? My Dad could easily beat up your Dad!'.
God here is painted as super-duper in the extreme - omnipresent, omniscient and omnipotent. Unbeatable by any two-bit deity concocted by believers of "false religions"....
(I presume you meant "akin" and not "skin"
). Yes, I think that's one of the reasons for creating Gods.
...To that end, they can't accept the obviousness of evolution, because creation is clearly not perfect, no matter the clever rationalisations of the ID crowd. No, God got everything right. Any faults are our own. Basically God is like a corporation claiming that all care will be taken but no responsibility can be accepted.
And in the oft-repeated arguments between ID/Creationism and Evolution, that's why things like the bacterial flagella and the recurrent laryngeal nerve regularly come up.
The eye is one of the earlier examples held up by Creationists as an example of something that they say is too complex to have evolved - that was deemed to be "irreducibly complex" ("you can't have half an eye" was a common refrain). It was then pointed out that, yes, you
can have half an eye, or less than half. And there are many examples of creatures, both extant and extinct, that do. That example was then dropped by most Creationists and the "irreducible complexity" of bacterial flagella was used (popularized by well known Creationists like Michael Behe).
The recurrent laryngeal nerve is one example often used by people critiquing ID/Creationism of "bad design" - i.e. something that, due the non-forward-looking nature of Evolution, seems bizarre from a design standpoint, but is perfectly understandable when considering the morphological changes that happened to the bodies of animals as the evolved. The human childbirth process is another!
PS. I just noticed a typo in my earlier post - I meant "invent" rather than "invest". Perhaps Freudian, considering the analogy. It reminds me of when Mum wrote to her publisher and inadvertently addressed the envelope to "Anus & Robertson"