More about how evolution works: multicellularity (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, October 30, 2016, 12:01 (2944 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I repeat, do you see purpose in anything related to evolution? Possibly a purposeful God?
dhw:I fully recognize the possibility that God exists, and if he does, then he would certainly have had a purpose in creating life. I look at the history of life, so far as we know it, and see a higgledy-piggledy story of comings and goings, and so I assume that this endlessly fascinating process of change is what God intended (= his purpose).
DAVID: If God started life He must have had a goal, and I don't believe it was with the idea of seeing what endless weird permutations of life could be created. That is what you have written.

I know what I have written. My assumption is that if he created a system that produced endless weird permutations of life, he intended the system he created to produce endless weird permutations of life. Why is that so difficult to accept?

DAVID: Why not a goal of a very special type of creature that could relate to Him very directly? That makes it very personal.

Because that does not explain the endless weird permutations of life. However, I do not exclude dabbling from my theistic version. Humans may have evolved without it (a wonderful new permutation, with our enhanced degrees of consciousness) or he may have hit on a new idea and intervened. I have a slight problem, though, about how we can have direction relations with a personal God who, according to you, deliberately hides himself away behind a quantum wall.

dhw: I don’t think he would create something he didn’t want. His personal motivation, then, might be enjoyment of the spectacle, and curiosity as to what his invention might come up with next.
DAVID: You imply that He creates only what He wants, and then switch it around, and say He has to anticipate what comes next. One thought doesn't follow the next.

He doesn’t have to anticipate it. That is the whole point. In my hypothesis, what he wants is a process whose development even he can’t predict. Which is more enjoyable: a story with no surprises, or a story which has you wondering what’s coming next?

dhw:If he does not exist, the purpose is whatever individuals make it, but I have said over and over again that the two purposes “related to evolution” that are clear to me are survival and improvement.
DAVID: And I view survival and improvement are mechanisms to reach a goal, the real goal a perfected organism that can study His creation and understand it.

You asked me for purposes “related to evolution”, and these two apply whether God exists or not. As above, I don’t have a problem with humans being a special case. I do have a problem with your theory that all life’s endless weird permutations, extant and extinct, were specially designed to balance life in order to provide food in order to keep life going in order to produce humans.