Extinctions: Massive eruptions (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, August 29, 2016, 12:30 (3008 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: If prediction was the art of looking retrospectively at what has already happened, we would all be infallible prophets! However, knowing what has happened does not mean that it had to happen that way - only that it did happen that way.

DAVID: However, if a result is highly unusual, as in the production of human and their level of consciousness, one can strongly suggest something or somebody monkeyed with the works.-If God had to dabble, you can hardly say the appearance of humans was predictable! Here is the exchange that started this discussion:
DAVID: If God is at work the process is working. Humans are here. Not at all unpredictable.
Dhw: 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.-One moment we have evolution geared to the inevitable production of humans (predictable), and the next, God has to step in and monkey - nice pun! - with the works (unpredictable). Well, let's drop the subject. It's pointless anyway. No one can possibly know what was or wasn't predictable. Humans are here, and the process produced them. That's all we know.-DAVID (under “Convoluted human evolution”) DNA has shown that our evolutionary tree is very bushy and more like a river delta with streams in every direction:
https://aeon.co/ideas/human-evolution-is-more-a-muddy-delta-than-a-branching-tree?utm_s...
dhw: If your God specially wanted to create homo sapiens, why could he not simply have created homo sapiens (as he did in Genesis)?-DAVID: Did you miss the point? The other streams interbred with humans giving them immunity and other attributes the humans had not developed and were helped by.
-So your God was incapable of giving homo sapiens his (limited) immunity and other attributes without first guiding/dabbling other species of human into existence and then guiding/dabbling them to extinction? Here's another hypothesis: they just evolved (perhaps as per intelligent-cell-mechanism), and natural selection resulted in them dying out and homo sapiens surviving.
 
DAVID's comment: Looks like a guided evolution to me since the pattern is so unusual compared to other primate species.
dhw; I wonder why God would have guided evolution to produce the duckbilled platypus….We should not ask such questions, should we? Whatever is here was meant to be here, so God must have guided it to be here.
DAVID: If one looks for purpose one finds it.-I'm still waiting for a platypussy purpose, but thank you for this very honest assessment of your thought processes.