I love the way people claim that God 'could have' 'used' evolution.
I don't know what 'used' is supposed to mean;do we posit a mechanism, and what is it; how are the links made in absence of God telling us...but what are we to do with 'could have'?
He either did or didn't; if he 'could have' show us how; give us an argument that understands evolution's historic contempt for the idea of a relating god from Epicurus onwards; let's see how the modern development of the idea intersects with a concrete actual God in a concrete actual world...'could have'?
I could have bought out BHP...if I had the money...I could have swum naked to Chile...if I could have...this phrase is an embarrasment of absence in argument and stands for nothing but an intellectual black hole: everything enters, and nothing comes out.
If this is merely a logical 'could have' it gets us nowhere, particularly as it pretends that the logic is patent, which it is not, and leaves it to the listener to imagine what the proponent's logic is and insert it. Its a bluff; God could not have used evolution, because he told us that he didn't. God doesn't deal in hypotheticals.
But there's more to it:
God 'could have' used evolution, but only if we rob both of their meaning. An easy error that is made is to think that 'evolution' is a real thing in the world; it is not! It is a theory that exists in the human mind. It was made up expressly to eliminate God. So 'evolution' and 'creation' (or 'design') are only 'compatible' if we talk about two things that didn't happen, two things that seem to float in an ill-considered make believe.
In the real world Evolution = not by God; creation = by God. So to put them together is to claim that God used 'not by God' to create, celebrating Epicurus' separation of the 'gods' and the world in a most peculiar fashion.
Why would we follow a pagan?
Moreover, the small changes have to be 'evolutions' small changes from ooze to humans; there is no way this has been, or seemingly could be, explained in the real world (not the imagination of materialists who seem to think that it could have happened...).
So God could not have 'used' 'not by God' as the idea evaporates in a puff of meaninglessness.
