When Behe discusses his billiards shot scenario, it includes front loading a design at the big bang.
Setting aside the instant of the Big Bang as a Mystery … it is a long chain of cause and effect. No “poof” miracles required. THAT is Providence.
John, you once accepted this point. Now you are just being difficult.
Providence is where the only miracle involved in a very long chain of cause and effect is at the beginning of creation when God ordains a specific outcome at a specific time and place.
It remains unclear how that would be different from the creation of Adam. Why could that not have been ordained at the beginning of creation?
Ahhhhh… more concrete thinking…
We are prisoners of YEC expectations. Adam was made from dust in a day. That is not providence… that is a miracle.
No George, that is an assertion, not a definition. 
It would of course depend on how extraordinarily “favorable” the conditions were – which would, as I said, “depend on the prevailing conditions of the sea in question.”
The Roaring Forties get their power from the Earth’s rotation. Nullifying that effect, for any significant period of time, would require playing with the laws of physics – a miracle, by most definitions.
This would be particularly true if the conditions needed to be sufficiently favorable that a bark canoe would not be swamped (which is likely to happen in even the gentlest of open-ocean conditions).
I never said so. However, going in a non-straight line will necessarily increase the distance.
It is not clear what your map is of – it does not appear to be of Bass Strait and its islands:
Island-hopping would lengthen the time of the overall journey, and thus how long favorable conditions would need to be maintained for. It also cannot decrease the size of the largest ‘leg’ below the largest gap between the islands in the journey.
It would also increase the calorie-cost of the crossing – which in turn raises the question of whether these bleak, rocky, uninhabited islands would provide a source of easily-accessible carbs.
Not true. It’s just that the “poof” miracle happened a long time ago, though as you previously said, not necessarily at the Big Bang. I believe your previous limit was thousands of years previously. Anyway, it’s still a miracle, so the distinction between providence and miracle is in regard to timing of the miracle only.
Do you wish to change your definition of providence from a miracle at least thousands of years ago to one at the big bang? No problem.
But once more, given quantum effects, this would not seem to be possible, even for God. He could not declare at the Big Bang, for example, that some particular U-235 atom would spontaneously fission at some particular instant.
Because no chain of natural cause and effect would result in poofing into existence of a complete organism. Only things that are the consequence of the initial conditions of the universe would be achievable by “providence”. Nothing physically impossible would qualify. (Then again, as mentioned above, I doubt any particular other event many billions of years later would either.)
This is also why I see no difference between what you call “providence” and a regular miracle. The only distinction is the timing.
George, simply repeatedly posting the map does not establish its relevance. Is this a map of some random chain of islands posted only to establish the (blatantly obvious) point that you can island hop – if you are willing to take a longer route – in this case 12% longer? If so, then it really added nothing to the conversation.
It appears to be a map of the same area, rotated 120 degrees.
The big problem with the island-hopping idea is that the islands being hopped between are too small and desolate to be inhabited:
This is Curtis Island, half a mile of exposed rock with minimal vegetation.
If I understand George’s scenario, he isn’t proposing diffusion among inhabited islands. He’s supposing a single voyage by stages, one canoe with one paddler going from island to island until he gets to Tasmania. Why this paddler would do any such thing is left as an exercise for the reader.
If so, then George has managed to badly obscure that fact by his odd rotation, badly cluttered map (which gives minimal view of the islands under discussion), and lack of any geographic markers.
Yes, but they’d still have to either find food and shelter on these “small and desolate” islands, or take them with them on a bark canoe that has little freeboard (and so little cargo-carrying capacity) and is unsuited for ocean travel, even unladen.
Addendum: “uninhabited” in this context also comes with some implication of unsuited, or at least marginal, for supporting human life.
And what would this intrepid explorer be going to Tasmania for anyway? Surely not just to mate with the islanders? Is it likely that someone on the island would have sex with a random stranger from a very different culture?
I don’t think it would be “a random stranger from a very different culture” – it would be a mainland Aboriginal with a Tasmanian Aboriginal.
I can see a few scenarios why somebody might (if it were even possible) seek to do this: e.g. becoming outcast from their community, wanderlust. But in any of these examples it would seem more practical simply to wander further away on the mainland, than to risk death by drowning, or by exposure, dehydration or malnutrition, if trapped by adverse ocean conditions on one of the smaller islands.
1st: You accuse me of using a map that doesnt belong to Tasmania.
2nd: I change the orientation closer to the one you used without all the lines, and you are still faulting me for including lines (including latitudes that are uniquely Tasmania’s!).
Then you criticize an island hopping strategy - - which is the ONLY way 1 or more canoes traveling 3.5 mph is going to allow an ambitious aborigine to find the source of smoke trails on the edge of the world (Tasmania).
The longest island hop of about 21 miles could easily be done in a day. And using the leeward side of these islands makes travel less grim.
Some of the islands do seem quite empty - - but their key virtue is they usually dont sink and they have plenty of space for storing provisions for the next leg towards Tasmania.
Hi George, the map is pretty irrelevant, we all agree island hopping is a theoretically possible strategy. It just doesn’t seem very pragmatic.
How would this hypothetical dude even know that there was a chain of unknown islands leading to this unknown bigger island? How would he know what route to follow to get to this place whose existence he wouldn’t know of? But apparently the answer to every possible objection is “providence”.
It is the ONLY way to cross the body of water, it is quite do-able, and with Provodence equal God’s control over storms, waters and human passions, quite reasonable - - especially compared to the target audience’s pre-existing premises of six days of creation.
If providence is involved, that’s certainly not the only way to get across. If God calmed the sea to allow one of Adam’s descendants to cross, why not do it in one go, instead of multiple legs? I should also note that this whole Tasmania thing is only a problem if Adam lived after the land bridge was flooded.
