So you speak in subjectivist terms as if they were objective facts and don't even have the awareness to know the difference.
You say man is "marvellous" based on your own "states of...brain and body" states that are very fleeting. Miss breakfast and find yourself troubled by your supervisor too much and you may find your brain and body in such states where marvellous is inconjurable. Man is no more marvellous than the current state of your digestion. I find this passage particularly telling:
You seem to be working off your own definition of hope, exclusive to the inside of your head. Where is it written that to have "hope", one needs to appeal to some being external to himself? Hope is simply a desire coupled with optimism that it will be fullfilled in the future.
Very well then you have this internalized sense of optimism. You don't know if the thing hoped for exists, you have no power to bring it about yourself, there is no external place to appeal and you have no way of seeing if the thing hoped for shall ever become real (you will be long obliviated before man's evolutionary fate is decided).
Remind me again why you hold Christians in derision for their believing in Mr. Sky-Friend? Do you still wait by the fireplace for Santa?
You also seem very down on the concept of nihilism. You make dismissive gestures but no arguments. Why, if there be no God, is nihilism not the default outlook?
I bring these things up because your argument is riddled with inconsistencies and subjective declarations and dialogue is impossible when 2 different languages are used. Using subjective emotionalist terms to discuss objective materialist fact is impossible. You cannot call something good or beneficial unless it has meaning outside your own subjective self. What is good and beneficial to an atheist hedonist would be deplorable to the average christian because the christian prizes eternal moral communion with his creator for more than he prizes fleeting physical pleasures in a decaying body. You cannot say something is evolutionarily beneficial without first claiming the life has value. To whom does that life have value: itself? A worthless proposition. A thing made by accident, scratching about from one moment to the next in a futile effort to dodge the death that will inevitably claim it cannot have value. Everything is fated to ruin, even the stars. Someday the last man will bury himself deep to avoid his fate but his dead hand will unfurl and the last poem will blow into ash as the last dying star convulses and fades.
Marvelous? Good? Beneficial?....HOPE?
More like: contempt, pity, mild bemusement
But since you mewl to return to the dialogue: can evolution be kick-started by the hand of the Divine?
The admission of this statement is: God wanted man to exist.
The second question is: Did God intend man to reach his current form or was man's final form a free-flowing event?
If the latter: God created a world where conscious beings may never have occurred. In which case we might have never become men wherein God says "it is good" but instead we just as easily (more probably) have remained amoeba or even loose strands of protein and God would have called it "good enough" and still rested on the 7th day.
But seeing as molecules, atoms, waves and quanta only work in certain manners--round pegs being ill-suited for square holes--it seems God did not simply scatter his Tinker-Toys allowing them to assume whatever form they fell into.
If the former we ask: did God allow events to unfold or did he nudge them from time to time to a pre-determined end?
Again, taking the latter first: This is in effect claiming a day of creation might as well be reckoned a billion years each. I fnd it to be the weakest argument among christians embarrassed by their own creation stories colliding with materialist fact but it bodes worst for would-be materialists too embarrassed to admit they want to be christians.
It certainly fills the bill for your timid cravings of Purpose, Hope and Beneficence but it so thoroughly mishandles the cration story of Genesis as to devolve (heh) from an discussion of science into a dialogue on hermeneutics. It ceases to be a matter of "what does science say" as it is more a matter of "are we reading this right?" and I have no desire for THAT conversation.
As to the former: it says man was meant to be but he was meant to scratch, claw and kill his way into his current form amid a world of bitter cold, wasting plagues and languishing starvation and on up into...what exactly we don't know. If that be the case it was no God that brought us here but a raving devil.
