Innovation and Speciation: whale changes (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, May 14, 2017, 11:57 (2529 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Your “entire point” is that ALL species, lifestyles and natural wonders – including whales, weaverbirds’ nests, monarch butterflies’ metamorphoses and migration – required advance planning by your God in order to supply the energy to keep life going until he designed the one thing he wanted to design, which was humans. But I know you prefer to separate all these elements of your “entire point”, because taken together they don’t make much sense.
DAVID: I sorry you don't see the 'sense'. It would make no sense if all God produced was humans.

Of course not. But that doesn’t mean he had to design every species etc. individually for the sake of humans. Look at your own bewilderment:
DAVID: We have no idea why a land animal decided to go into an aquatic environment with all the biologic complications associated with it. It must be God's guidance.

You have no idea why it entered the water, or why your God would “guide” it into the water and design all its complicated adaptations when all he wanted to do was design humans (see below). How about the possibility that the land animal decided for itself (without God’s guidance) to enter the water because at that particular time and place there was more food in the water than there was on dry land? And as its move into the water was successful, stage by stage it adapted itself to life in the water (using its perhaps God-given intelligent, structure-changing, adaptive, inventive mechanism), until its whole body had reached an optimum form? Does this make sense or not?

dhw:You have now added the hypothesis that whenever environmental change was involved, your God changed the structures before changing the environment. And so fish were fully equipped before they stepped onto the land, and the monarch was fully equipped and instructed before God changed the climate and forced it to emigrate.
DAVID: I don't look at animal's structural changes and environmental shifts as occurring in any special order.

Good. So we can now discard your theory that your God planned innovations, lifestyles etc. in advance of the environmental changes that they countered or exploited.

DAVID: I view changes in species as purposeful, and think Darwin's view of struggle for survivability as a minor point.

I also view them as purposeful, and to survival I add improvement, both of which I regard as supremely important, because once we have multicellularity, we have organisms both competing and cooperating, partly no doubt in order to improve their chances of survival.

dhw: There is no denying the complexity of the adaptations you have mentioned, but there is no logic to link the above collection of disjointed “guesses” you have made to explain the process.
DAVID: I haven't been disjointed in demonstrating the complexity of this animal's evolution. It requires God's planning. Why He wanted whales is beyond my reasoning.

Of course there is nothing disjointed in your account of the whale’s complex evolution. What is “beyond your reasoning” is why God “wanted” the whale and every other species, lifestyle and natural wonder in order to provide energy until he designed the one thing he wanted, which was humans. You have acknowledged that my alternatives make perfect sense, but you prefer an explanation that makes no sense even to you.