Whoa! There is a lot there.
Do you believe that God created all the "ingredients" necessary for life and then he just looked what will happen? Do you believe that somehow he controlled and steered these processes or did he not get involved and as soon as God had created the necessary building blocks of life everything started to come together in a magical way?
First off, you must know that I was once a firm young earther myself. It was the failings of YEism itself that led me to explore a wider view.
My personal opinion would be that God designed the laws of this universe in a way that they help to accomplish His will. The evidence, in my opinion, indicates that the laws were so well setup that much, most, of what happened did not need help.
Think of an analogy. Does God have to work to keep a plane in the air or does it stay there because of the physics He created?
Now, having said that, I think that it was also necessary for intervention at times to get a particular outcome. But the laws that govern astronomy and geology and biology seem to have been created well enough to handle most of it.
Would you also be able to believe in evolution without believing in God? Or can you only believe in evolution because you also believe in God?
Again, my opinion is that the laws that govern the processes are efficient enough to have allowed what we see to happen. So, no, that evolution has happened does not point any more for or against God than does the observation that we have gravity.
In other words, the two are separate issues. They are not mutually exclusive. You can accept either, neither or both in any combination. (Please do not misinterpret that to meant that I think that it is OK to reject God. That is NOT what I am saying.)
Or could you also believe that somehow there is this metaphysical force out there which makes life arrange itself? Because this seems just so unbelievably dumb to me.
And such a thing would be dumb. Life is just chemistry. Chemistry following the rules of this universe. There is no metaphysical force necessary to make chemistry work. And my opinion is that God set up the rules of chemistry to make life likely given little more than liquid water. (Of course, having only known of one kind of life, this may not even be needed.)
I mean how can somebody even believe this? It's so absurd. Evolutionists deny God but at the same time they have to believe in some metaphysical force or principle which affects the whole universe and which makes life arise on its own.
No one, or few at least, do believe that.
I doubt you could find many biologists who attribute life to some vague, metaphysical force.
However, you will find that many scientists, somewhere around half in the USA, do believe in God. So it is only a fraction that deny God while about an equal number have no problem accepting both God and the findings of science.
Why in the world should life arise out of water? This is like saying if I take a hammer and wood and just lay it on the ground and then wait long enough then I'll have some nice furniture simply because out there is a law which guarantees that a hammer will always interact with wood and this will result in furniture. Don't you realize how absurd this is?
To paraphrase someone, the world is not only stranger than you think, it is stranger than you can think.
It seems quite possible that given a few favorable conditions, that life may be an inevitable result. It is just chemistry and the chemistry of this universe seems ready made for life.
The hammer analogy fails because it is not like reality. It sounds absurd because it is.
Evolution mainly sounds absurd to those who know little about it. Those who learn more about it tend to find it more convincing the more they learn.
I think that people can definitely mess themselves up with this pseudo-scientific stuff, in my opinion this is nothing else than brain-farts. The more you dive into it the more messed up you become and the less you're able to think clear.
While I disagree with your conclusion here, I do agree that it is an area that can be harmful.
Before I continue, I feel the need to say something. I hope I don't come across the wrong way and feel free to take it or leave it. You start a lot of threads that seem to boil down to you finding something that goes so far against what you believe that you have trouble accepting it but at the same time you also wonder if it might be true. It sounds like you may spend a lot of time reading skeptic websites and the like. To me, it seems like this may be a dangerous thing for you to be doing. You get very worked up of them and it appears that some of these things may be causing you doubt in your faith. It might be helpful for you to avoid such things unless your faith is strong enough to not buy into it. It is just a matter of why should you challenge yourself more than you can handle.
One reason I find the need to post on this topic is because of what you describe. It is easy to find anecdotes of people who have lost their faith after being exposed to the truth of the matter. Many feel like they have been led astray and wonder what else they may have been led astray about. Others are convinced that evolution and the Bible are incompatible and therefore reject God when they can no longer deny the evidence.
Hopefully, some of these people would benefit from seeing that it is possible to reject YEism and accept the truth without rejecting the Bible and God.
Furthermore, when I was going through the process of rejecting YEism, I got very angry over the dishonest tactics of the YE leaders. So I hope that by explosing these, that I can help weed the repeatition of such from the debate.
