Extinctions: Massive eruptions (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, August 27, 2016, 07:26 (2802 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: We don't know if the Chicxulub asteroid was God's doing or not. The 'bad luck' quote is in the title of David Raup's highly regarded book. What seems to be true is that with each giant extinction, evolution advanced to more complex forms. If God is at work the process is working. Humans are here. Not at all unpredictable.

dhw: You obviously share Raup's view that most extinctions are bad luck, since you have stated it yourself. Bad luck and good luck are synonymous with chance. This means your God either couldn't or didn't want to control the environment, except for the occasional dabble. -DAVID: Raup's 'bad luck' is his way of saying that sudden environmental changes caused extinctions. My interpretation and his is that this means the life that became extinct couldn't adapt fast enough to survive, no more. It does not imply God hurled Chicxulub or not. He may have.-I doubt if many people would deny that sudden changes caused extinctions, or that those organisms which couldn't survive didn't survive. I thought we'd long passed that stage of discovery. My question is how your God's control or non-control of the environment reflects on your concept of divine preplanning. However, I take Raup's point and yours: it's bad luck either way on the organisms slaughtered either by chance or by God's choice. Not sure how such a comment helps us understand the process of evolution, though.-dhw: As for humans, leaving aside the question of who or what would have been capable of making predictions, I thought your whole “difference” campaign was based on your belief that they were NOT predictable, and it needed some really special dabbling from your God to produce them.
DAVID: You are off on a tangent. Evolution shows us there was a strong drive to create humans out of apes. -It is you who jumped from extinctions to greater complexity to humans. If we believe in common descent, evolution only shows us that humans descended from apes, just as every other organism descended from preceding organisms. Or are you telling us that there was a strong drive for earlier organisms to produce weaverbirds, elephants and duckbilled platypuses? 
 
DAVID: Their physical and mental capacities are different in kind from apes, and in this portion of known evolutionary history extinctions played no role unless one looks back 60+ million years ago to Chicxulub and goodbye dinos. -So if they are different in kind, how does that make them predictable?