Watching asteroids; possible damage (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, March 05, 2017, 18:52 (2821 days ago) @ dhw

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

dhw: 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.

Because I reached this conclusion which feels so right to me after reading endless books that humans are the desired endpoint. We differ in that I have developed faith in that I am right and the idea of a supreme power does not offend my sense of logic. I follow John Leslie as closely as I follow Adler: Universes, 1989 is woth reading in the full. His closing conclusion is "God is real and/or there exist many, very varied universes". I interpret this as meaning God is real or there is are multiverses, or God invented all the multiverses and picked this one to be fine-tuned for life. At this point in my reading I finally came to realize there has to be a God.

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.

dhw: 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.

dhw: 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.

You are again skipping over the point of this discussion: why dangerous asteroids? He must have had to include them as He evolved the universe. Threfore limited to some degree.

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.

dhw: 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.

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

It is your confusion, not mine. From the beginning I've said that God controls evolution, either pre-programmed or with dabbles. I don't know that God's limitations, if any, required that He use an evolutionary process. He may have chosen evolution of life as His preferred way. That is what He absense leaves us with: the problem of interpretation. ID folks don't like theistic evolution for just that reason. They believe in an all-powerful God who doesn't need evolution, and end up not believing in any kind of evolutioanary process while studying it! They conclude He simply steps in and speciates! I could do that also based on my reading but I simply prefer (for no good reason)the pre-programing or dabble approach. What influences me is the evolutionary processes I see in devolution of the universe and in the development of a life-supporting Earth.