Purpose and design (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, April 23, 2017, 10:37 (2769 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: […] Now you are shifting your ground and saying that ALL multicellular organisms required God’s programming or dabbling. In that case, you can’t use the “natural challenges” argument to support your claim that non-necessity proves that humans were the only goal.
DAVID: Good point. I was twisting Darwin's argument. God guides evolution and causes speciation. Once again, 23 million years ago only certain organisms began to progress to humans. Everyone else stayed the same. Something or someone pushed that line to complexify so much. I choose God over chance.

An autonomous (perhaps God-given) IM excludes chance. If God exists, I don’t have a problem with him dabbling humans, though with his now unlimited powers I’m a bit surprised that once conditions were OK, he had to do so many different dabbles. At least the Creationists have him doing it all in one go. But no, my real problem is with your irrational insistence that he specifically designed every natural wonder etc. solely for the sake of humans.

DAVID: Irrational only to you, since you are unwilling to understand the marked difference in kind of humans
dhw: I have never denied the marked difference between our degree of consciousness and that of other animals, or between parts of our anatomy and those of other animals. But that does not mean your God designed the weaverbird’s nest in order to keep life going for our sake or to provide food for us.
DAVID: The weaverbird bird belongs to an eco-niche that supplies food to someone, and eventually some of what is eaten becomes our food. We do eat that bird nest.

So humans would not have had food if the weaverbird had stuck to an ordinary common-or-garden nest instead of your God teaching it to tie complicated knots. Yeah, yeah, God moves in mysterious ways…

DAVID: We can muse about his thoughts, but why try if we have no way of knowing what is correct? What will that discussion tell us?
dhw: Why muse about the existence of God, the origin of life and the universe, what happened before the big bang (if the big bang ever happened), the nature and origin of consciousness, the possibility of an afterlife, if we have no way of “knowing” what is correct? One moment you are telling us “the only way to study Him is through his creations”, and the next moment you tell us there is no point in trying to study him. […]
DAVID: We can muse and discuss whatever has some scientific factual substance. Your comment: "next moment you tell us there is no point in trying to study him" is not consistent with my statements. I have always said study Him through His works. Many of us can certainly see His purpose, even if you cannot.

By studying God, I understand trying to work out his nature and his purpose. You do not want to discuss his nature because it is unknowable and one must not humanize, and you only want to talk about purpose if it is the one and only purpose you believe in, which is to produce humans.