Purpose and design (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, April 13, 2017, 10:25 (2780 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: […] Genome manipulation for speciation does not seem to be the limiting problem. Thus we can eliminate 1 as God having to learn how to manipulate genome speciation.
dhw: Hold on. According to you it requires a special manipulation to produce the human brain. Knowing the general principle doesn’t give you the precise formula for the one thing you particularly want. Option 1 does not mean he had a blueprint for humans. He may have thought the whale would resemble himself (and even fiddled several versions of it), but no…it still didn’t have that extra degree of consciousness… better try something else.
DAVID: See my comments in my answer to your discussion with Tony.

Not answered. You have not eliminated Option 1 for the reason I have given above. Nor have you or Tony eliminated Options 2 (your God didn’t think of humans till late on in the process) or 3 (he gave organisms the wherewithal to design their own evolution, but may have dabbled) for the reasons I gave in my post of yesterday.

DAVID: He had to wait for geologic and atmospheric changes in the Earth as it evolved. Proper continents, ocean currents, weather patterns, etc. had to appear and stabilize. Chicxulub had to happen as a final step in severe asteroid bombardment. His limits, if any, might reside here.
dhw: So your God, who could create and fine-tune the universe, may not have had control over the environment. He had to “wait” for it do the right thing, to “appear”, to “happen”. Chicxulub: what a stroke of luck…maybe, or maybe not, because after your firm rejection o[/i[i]]f limitations, you are now back to either/or. Discussion continued in my reply to Tony.
DAVID: My discussion is there also. I'm with Tony.

Not answered. It is you who have suggested that God might have had to wait, i.e. that his limitations forced him to rely on changes beyond his control. Your problem here is that you cannot make up your mind whether he was or was not in control of the ever changing environment. If he was in control, and if his sole purpose was to create humans, he delayed and you don’t know why. If he wasn’t in control, his powers were limited, which conflicts with your belief that he could have created humans without difficulty. But you still can’t see that there is no conflict of ideas if you simply acknowledge that God’s sole purpose may not have been the production of humans, and/or the vast range of life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders were not all geared to that one purpose.