Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, February 23, 2017, 14:52 (2830 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: You are constantly rethinking your positions, which is not a bad thing to do. > Of course we don’t know if God cares or not, and we hardly need Adler to tell us that.

Not so much re-thinking, as in the sense of revising, but more clearly restating my underlying thoughts.

DAVID: You've never understood my basic primacies that I do not come from a position that God loves us. I stay away from religion. Your own concepts of a possible God seem to come from your childhood training. Can you tell me your version of how we should think about God or do you have a version?

dhw: I have never tried to hide my own ambivalent feelings about the existence and nature of God. Our discussions have always centred on the inconsistencies and contradictions in your own concepts. (I don’t mean that unkindly. I don’t think it’s possible to hold firm beliefs in this context without blinding oneself to the obvious objections – hence the ultimate recourse to faith.)

Accepted. You simply cannot give a firm description of a personal theology out of total disbelief. Therefore you cannot answer the question as to which is correct, chance or design.

dhw: The fact that humans arrived, that the duckbilled platypus arrived, and that 99% of species arrived and departed is history. God’s intentions (if he exists) are speculation.[/i]

DAVID: I start with another first conclusion. Humans are here against all odds.

dhw: So is every other form of life. That is what we are trying to explain.

Once life appears against all odds, humans are the most difficult to explain by chance.

dhw: I know you love your new coinage “God-lite”, but God creating a mechanism that would provide an ever changing spectacle of life forms (while allowing him to dabble) is not “God-lite”. It merely offers an alternative to your own avowedly non-sensical interpretation of your God’s evolutionary intentions and methods, and I’m afraid my being stuck in limbo does not endow your scenario with the sense that is so patently missing.

DAVID: You are simple offering God in a slightly different form. Only chance or design are possible.

dhw: I am pointing out that there is a theistic explanation of the evolutionary process that dispenses with all the factors that make no sense even to you.

It is not that God's activities make no 'sense' to me, it is that I don't understand why He chose the methods He did. I'm sure He had His reasons. Only in that way it makes no sense. That doesn't stop me from thinking God is required by the evidence.