Watching asteroids; possible damage (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, March 05, 2017, 13:38 (2599 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: …since you are not prepared to ask why God wanted to create humans (your own answers having led to highly confusing hypotheses), and since you believe it possible that he doesn’t even care what happens to individual humans, why is it so important for you to establish that he planned the universe and the whole of life for the sake of humans, as opposed to their being perhaps the result of his experiments or of an afterthought?

DAVID: It is not important to me that God created humans.

That was not what I asked. You have based your whole interpretation of evolution on the rigid premise that God planned humans from the start. And so I am asking why this basic premise, which leads to so many self-confessed "wanderings all over the place" (as below), is so important to you.

DAVID: Our discussions and your critical observations have made me defend my choices. I appreciate the debate on your part and my arrival at current conclusions. What you have seen is a stream of consciousness as I have responded to you, while I wander/wonder all over the place.

Thank you for this honest description of your arguments. I share your wonder, but the wandering – as you well know – is the source of our many disagreements. (N.B. my generally negative approach should never be taken to mean I think I have any answers. And I acknowledge wholeheartedly that my indecision makes me wrong one way or the other.)

DAVID: I now am sure of my thought as follows: God uses evolution as a process, producing a universe in a single event which then evolved. He had the Earth appear in its special form with plate tectonics, etc., and finally He started life which then evolved to humans, an obvious desired end point. And the processes which cause life are too complex for a chance development. In those thoughts I am firmly certain.

This is where I must put on my theist hat, so that I can discuss the subject with you on your own terms. I can understand and indeed accept the case for humans being very, very special, but the dislocation comes when you insist on the “obvious desired end point” with the following choice:
DAVID: What is not certain is whether He pre-programmed each of these evolutions. If He did then he is really all-powerful per the Bible. If on the other hand He had to dabble, then He is limited.

I find it hard to believe that your God - who can create out of his own energy a whole universe plus all the big and little bits and pieces necessary for life - finds himself unable to do what he wants to do with his own invention. If he CHOSE to give evolution a free rein, but sometimes CHOSE to dabble (e.g. perhaps with Chixculub, or with the pre-human brain) then dabbling does not mean he is limited.

DAVID: No one knows which is correct, and nothing in the known historical record can tell us. Either way, all powerful or semi-powerful, He is in tight control of those processes. He certainly could have given organisms some degree of inventiveness, and then corrected what went off the rails.

You are presupposing rails, because you are presupposing a definite plan right from the outset to produce humans. You have categorically rejected the possibility that plants, weaverbirds, monarch butterflies and parasitic wasps can work out their own lifestyles. However, your “some degree of inventiveness” (my autonomous inventive mechanism, or intelligence) means that either they DID work it out, or they tried and failed (“went off the rails”) and so God had to correct them, because he needed them to keep life going etc. This is the sort of “wandering” that makes non-sense (the hyphen is important) out of the otherwise immensely powerful case you always make for design. I could even see sense in the idea that he really did design all these lifestyles and wonders for the sheer pleasure of their creation – but not because he was forced to do it until his limited powers enabled him to dabble the human brain.

DAVID: We have no evidence of any modifications beyond the minor adaptations that organisms can accomplish. Anything beyond what I have stated is pure guess work until we understand speciation, if we ever can.

True. But that is not a good reason for clinging to a hypothesis which leads to so much confusion.