Natures wonders: squid eye lens focuses exactly (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, August 18, 2017, 13:33 (2652 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Of course everything requires explanation. Mine is simple, God.
dhw: You have not explained how God's need to design eight stages of whale etc.etc. in order to produce the human brain fits in with the history of life. Keeping life going does not make the human brain the sole purpose, since life kept going and will no doubt continue to keep going with or without the human brain.

DAVID: You have just made my point. Our brain is obviously not here as a necessity for survival. Struggle for survival as a tenet of Darwinism goes out the window. An innate part of life having a mechanism to improve ( your idea) or to complexify (mine) is much more to the point…

So how does this make your point that the whole of life’s history, including the eight stages of whale and the monarch’s lifestyle and the weaverbird’s nest, was geared to the production of the human brain. EVERY innovation was unnecessary if your starting point is bacteria. However, once the process of improvement had begun, and life diversified, it is perfectly possible that many innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders improved organisms’ chances of survival, though that may not be the only motive for improvement.

DAVID: ….but these ideas are only ways to compensate for the reality that bacteria didn't need to get more complex other than to learn to live in extreme environments. Why improvement or complexity can only be explained by a driving force, God, not chance.

In the context of evolutionary history, the theistic choice is between your God directing every innovation etc. and the organisms doing their own directing in response to prevailing conditions. Chance doesn’t come into it, except for environmental changes, which are a major problem for your theory.

DAVID: As for the bush of life, I simply accept it as God's method of evolution providing food energy for life to have the energy to survive for all the time evolution needed to advance to us.

Why “all the time evolution needed…” if God directed everything? Surely you mean all the time your all-powerful God needed to fulfil his sole purpose of advancing evolution to us. And that still doesn’t explain why he had to design eight stages of whale, the monarch’s migration and the weaverbird’s nest in order to keep life going until he himself could produce the human brain. Would life have ended without them?