Darwin & Wallace (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, October 08, 2015, 12:34 (3121 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Let me get this straight. You “can't see any other purpose than humans. Nothing else makes sense.” So God designed every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder from bacteria onwards to ensure that the balance of nature would enable humans to be produced and to eat. However, prior to the arrival of humans he continually changed the balance of nature (extinctions) so that millions of these innovations, lifestyles and wonders would be eliminated, even though he only designed them to enable humans to be produced and to eat.-DAVID: No, everyone who evolved on the way to humans had to eat. That is obvious. Balance of nature was required all along.-The balance of nature was needed so that they could eat, but when the balance of nature changed, they couldn't eat and so they died, which shows that they were all necessary for the balance of nature which was necessary for the production and feeding of humans, who arrived millions of years later. I'm afraid I still find it very confusing. -dhw: I'm glad the above makes sense to you. Try this for a theistic hypothesis: God created an autonomous inventive mechanism which would allow cells to produce a vast variety of life forms in their quest for survival and/or improvement. Changes in the environment allowed for a continual stream of extinctions and innovations. Different forms of life dominated at different times. Currently the dominant form - if one discounts bacteria, which have survived from the earliest days - is humans, whose intelligence far exceeds that of all other known species. We have no idea what might happen during the next few billion years. It is “silly” to try and read God's mind, so we cannot know why he created the autonomous mechanism in the first place. Does that make sense or not?-DAVID: Make it a semi-autonomous IM and it makes sense to me.
-We'd need to define semi-autonomous in relation to the nature and degree of your God's participation, which you like to gloss over as “guidance”. But no matter how you define it, I'm glad you now appear to agree that we cannot know why God created an IM in the first place, and so it is “silly” to say his purpose was to produce humans.