God and evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, April 04, 2017, 12:38 (2788 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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.
DAVID: I know it was my idea. In these discussions I ruminate about possibilities and we explore them. 'Limits' and 'delay' are ideas we explored, not carved in stone.

Of course they are not carved in stone. You thought of ‘delay’ and limitations as a means of explaining the dichotomy between your two dogmas: humans were God’s sole purpose, and only God could have designed every life form, lifestyle and natural wonder. I offered you a bridge for that gap (experimentation) which you rejected. It seems that now you are rejecting your whole delay/limitations hypothesis in favour of “it doesn’t make sense to me either”, which = you don’t have a “clear explanation”.

dhw: 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.
DAVID: The clear explanation is balance of nature and eco-niche production of energy for a long evolutionary process.

We have long since agreed that the balance of nature means nothing more than life going on and favouring whichever species are best able to master conditions. This applies with or without humans and has absolutely no bearing on your claim that humans were God’s only purpose and everything else was related to that.

dhw: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”?
DAVID: Explanation given above, the same as usual.

So your God specially designed the weaverbird’s nest, the monarch’s lifestyle and the fly’s compound eye in order to keep life going until he was ready to produce humans? It didn’t make sense to you before, and that is why you came up with your delay-because-of-limitations hypothesis, which you now appear to be turning against. That leaves you, according to yourself, with “no clear explanation”, but you still refuse to consider the possibility that one or both of your two basic premises might be wrong.

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DAVID: Tony and I are very close together.

TONY: Humans, as the prime goal of all creation, or even of evolution, is truly just silliness, even according to science which claims everything is still evolving. If that were true, we must be in one of those periods of punctuated equilibrium. (my bold)

dhw: Tony will have to tell us himself how, if he agrees with you, your God’s personal design of the weaverbird’s nest, the monarch’s lifestyle and the fly’s compound eye constituted preparation for his "sole goal", the production of humans.

DAVID: Note Tony's reply. Yes Tony and I disagree about the centrality of humans. We are allowed to.

Of course you are. I am only pointing out that Tony disagrees with one of your two central dogmas, and we still don’t know how far he supports the other one, so you can hardly claim to be “very close together”.