God and evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, March 31, 2017, 15:12 (2792 days ago) @ dhw

DHW: I am playing the Devil’s advocate here, and may have to leave you to fight over your very different concepts of how and why your God has done what you think he has done. Any further discussion will, however, be hampered by the fact that neither David nor I accepts the authority of the Bible.
TONY: I see a lot of "Why Dr God do it this way? I wouldn't have if it'd been me."

dhw: Again, I don’t know where you get this idea from. Certainly not from my posts. The whole of this discussion is an attempt to explain WHY life’s history has taken this particular course (and from a theistic perspective, WHY God did it this way.) You already know David’s anthropocentric hypothesis, which doesn’t make sense to me. I have therefore offered three different theistic hypotheses: 1) God started out wanting to produce beings similar to himself (David’s theory) but he had to experiment for 3.X billion years before he got what he wanted. 2) God wanted to produce a spectacle for himself to watch, and humans only came to mind late on during the production. 3) Same idea of a spectacle, but he gave organisms the freedom and means to create their own different life forms etc., though he may also have dabbled. The means would be an autonomous, inventive intelligence. All three offer a theistic explanation of the apparently higgledy-piggledy comings and goings of life’s history (whether you believe in evolution or not) and of the comparatively late arrival of humans. David does not accept any of them, but agrees that they fit in with life’s history as we know it. Now you have the full background to this discussion.

Tony's comment is straightforward. He knows about humans laughing at the human backward upside-down retina as bad design as one stupid example. And it is appropriate in the discussions. What humans dismiss as poor design has always turned out to be the best design.