God and evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, April 03, 2017, 13:06 (2789 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The limits can be limits within an evolutionary process that God does not wish to change. God produces results by evolutionary processes. And either/or also refers to delays as humans see them or appearance of delay to us when one doesn't exist in God's mind.
dhw: Another obfuscation, and you know it. We both agree that if God exists, he used evolutionary processes. But if his sole purpose was to produce humans, you have told us that either there was a ‘delay’ because his powers were limited, or there was no ‘delay’. If there WAS a delay – the first of your own alternatives – and the limitation was not your God’s inability to find the formula for a creature resembling himself, what other limitations might he have had? Please answer.

DAVID: You see me as unreasonable when it doesn't fit your concept of the issue of delay. First, delay may be a human concept when people think God can create anything immediately. Secondly, as Tony points out, goals take preparation as part of evolutions. Third, evolutionary preparations may take time. Fourth, as God views His plans, there is no delay at all in His mind. Fifth we come to limits. The best conclusion is if God uses evolutionary processes there is no limit, no delay, only process. Back to 'is God limited?' I posed this originally as part of possible discussions and our current discussion result is in my view, that there is an appearance of limits, but we cannot know for sure, and God is likely not limited at all.

The concept of delay is YOURS not mine! It arises out of your insistence that the production of humans was your God’s only purpose. If they were not his purpose, their arrival cannot be called delayed! You later reject this interpretation, as "evolution requires time because of process. Thus delay." Of course evolution, whatever its outcome, takes time, but once again: there is only a delay if there is a specific purpose. If humans were not the specific purpose, there is no delay.

The problem, however, is not that dogma by itself, but the gap between it and your other dogma, which is that your God personally designed every life form, lifestyle and natural wonder extant and extinct, and did so for the sake of humans. When I pin this down to precise examples (the weaverbird’s nest, the monarch butterfly’s lifestyle, the fly’s compound eye) you cannot find a “clear explanation” concerning how they are related to his only goal. That is why you came up with your idea that maybe God had to ‘delay’ because he was limited. I offered you a hypothetical explanation to bridge the gap you created (God didn’t know how to achieve his goal and had to experiment), but you rejected that. You cannot think of any other limitation, and so you are leaning towards the alternative, which is that he is unlimited and we cannot bridge the gap (back to my three examples) because we can’t ‘know’ anything. The alternative to the unbridgeable gap is to remove one of the two dogmas that have created it: 1) the production of humans was NOT your God’s only purpose. 2) God did NOT personally design the nest, the lifestyle, the compound eye. Aren’t these possibilities worth considering, instead of merely claiming that God did it your way but you can’t find a “clear explanation”?