Balance of nature illustrated (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 03, 2015, 21:07 (3580 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: My thought is very different than yours: nature has to have a balance so that a food supply is available for all living beings. -Not quite. Nature keeps changing its balance, and some living beings survive while others don't.
 
DAVID: That allows the process of evolution to move forward and for complexity to emerge (either with God's guidance or not entirely. Note that humans only began to appear 6 million years ago. Life started about 3.8 byo. The balance maintained life until the current epoch. -The balance kept changing, but it's true that we still have life! I like “not entirely”. Is there a glimmer of a breakthrough here? Might you perhaps be about to concede that a few billion organisms and lifestyles could have emerged independently of God's guidance, or are you back to having him design half the nest and leaving the weaverbird to work out the other half?-DAVID: Balance gives the time to allow humans to appear though the evolutionary process. It did not cause humans.-“Gives the time to allow...” suggests that all the different changes in balance, all the innovations, all the strange lifestyles, all the comings and goings throughout the history of evolution - not to mention the countless environmental changes local and global - were divinely preprogammed or dabbled to allow humans time to “appear” (with another special dabble for the brain), and that is the issue between us. The diversity of life, from bacteria to trilobites to dinosaurs to weaverbirds' nests looks to me (yes, I know that's subjective) like a colossal free-for-all, and I doubt if even you would be able to find a link between all of them and the appearance of humans. If God exists, maybe a colossal free-for-all was what he wanted, but that doesn't fit in with the anthropocentric pattern you wish to believe in.