God and evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, March 19, 2017, 14:31 (2804 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: You don’t know whether he was or wasn’t capable of doing what he wanted to do. If he wasn’t capable, he had to “wait” – I call that “buying time” as you think he had to find ways to keep life going until humans appeared…
DAVID: You keep trying to make sense of the unknowable.

dhw: All our discussions are “trying to make sense of the unknowable”. I simply try to explain the implications of your own attempts. You stated explicitly that God did not “buy time”. If his purpose was to create humans and he was incapable of producing them straight away (one of your two hypotheses), he had to “buy time”. Yes or no?

'Buying time' asks if He is limited and not in control. The length of time of evolution to humans is 3.8 billion years. He may have chosen that length of time. Who knows? For Him time is limitless if we believe the Bible. No answer is possible.

DAVID: 99% had to go if evolution was to continue. Don't you see that?

dhw: I was responding to your inaccurate statement that “the balance of nature fed everyone”. No it didn’t. That is why the balance kept changing. Whether 99% “had to go” is another matter.

Changing conditions killed off 99%. The remainder always eats. Perfect sense.

dhw: ...when you say you don't know whether your God is in full control or not, you contradict yourself by rejecting any hypothesis that takes control away from him.
DAVID: Because you persist in removing too much control in your theories.

dhw: Your exact objection to my alternatives was: “Because some of your proposals take control from God.” Now, all of a sudden, it is “too much control”. I shan’t ask you to define how much loss of control is needed before we can call it loss of control. If you can’t see the contradiction, let’s move on.

You keep asking for the impossible. He may impose His own limits or time schedules as He sees fit. Yes, lets move on.

DAVID: Backsliding again. We both understand life's diversity feeds evolution.

dhw: What backsliding? Evolution is the process by which life has diversified. How on Earth does that mean your God designed the fly’s compound eye in order to keep life going until humans arrived?

See your own response: dhw: "There is no disagreement between us on the proposal that diversity is the result of the changing balance of nature, as caused by the changing energy supply. We have agreed that this has nothing whatsoever to do with humans being the “endpoint” of evolution."