God and evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, April 01, 2017, 10:29 (2791 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

DAVID: 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.

Yes indeed. But it is not a response to any of my posts and is irrelevant to this discussion, which concerns your insistence that humans were God’s only goal and everything else was related to it.