More about how evolution works: multicellularity (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, October 31, 2016, 11:44 (2943 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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: I can accept your supposition. it is quite clear. I don't accept your use of it to negate a purposeful goal.

Why do you think the creation of a fascinating spectacle including humans is not a purposeful goal?

dhw: 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.
DAVID: God requires the decision of faith.

That still doesn’t allow direct relations if he hides himself.

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.

dhw: 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?
DAVID: You've humanized Him totally. He is a person like no other person. "I am who I am". That is your prerogative as a non-believer.

Why is wanting an unpredictable spectacle more human than wanting direct relations with other beings, wanting other beings to study and understand one’s work, and requiring other beings to have faith in oneself? My hypothesis has nothing to do with my being an agnostic. Why do you think there are libraries full of books about the nature of God? Do all believers think God created all the weird wonders in order to produce food till humans came? Creationists believe in separate creation, Christians believe that Christ was the son of God born of a virgin, Jehovah’s Witnesses believe that God will choose 144,000 people to go to heaven, some Muslims think God will love them more and let them into heaven if they kill enough non-Muslims. These are your fellow believers whose beliefs you reject. I think my theistic hypothesis deserves to be taken seriously for its reasoning, not rejected because I am neither a believer nor a disbeliever.

dhw: 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.
DAVID: Yet it explains what we see.

My hypothesis explains what we see, without the problems of the weaverbird’s nest, of God designing “inadequate” (your word) organisms, of extinctions that are “bad luck” (accidental environmental changes) but meticulously planned (divinely controlled environmental changes), which have led you to admit at times that even you cannot follow what you interpret as your God’s logic.