Evolution, survival and adaptation (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, September 18, 2017, 10:11 (2622 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: With my theist hat on, I suggest he wanted to create an ever changing show which perhaps he continues to watch. You suggest he wanted to create Homo sapiens, you don’t know why he had to create a higgledy-piggledy bush of whales and monarchs and weaverbirds’ nests and hominins in order to get there, and he’s hidden himself because…well, why has he hidden himself, and is he watching or not?

DAVID: I recognize those are your questions which keep you agnostic. Accepting God's existence does away with your issues. How logical is God in human terms? Perhaps not at all.
dhw: They are not the questions that keep me agnostic. They are the questions I ask when I put on my theist hat, and you cannot answer them because they pinpoint the anomalies in your anthropocentric theory of evolution and your personal concept of your God.

DAVID: Your theistic hat contains a human attempt to be logical about God, rather than accepting the evidence that God's works offer. He can only be understood from what we see He created and how it seems He did it.

Of course my logic is human, but what makes you think it is not based on the evidence that your God’s works offer? Even you have agreed that my hypothesis fits in perfectly with the history of life as we know it! Yours doesn’t, which is why you don't answer the questions raised at the head of this post.

DAVID: You are not avoiding design, but trying to find ways around the principals of how design occurs. You know how it occurs in human terms on Earth today. Since you don't like the concept of God, the hidden eternal engineer of reality, you want a mechanism to appear, by itself, which must be by chance, after life appears (somehow, but lets avoid that miracle), that speciates with huge gaps in the fossil record.

Hey, hold on! Design occurs through intelligence, and I am proposing that all organisms are intelligent in their own particular way. Who says I don’t like the concept of God? I am an agnostic, not an atheist. I do not “want a mechanism that appears by itself by chance”! Its origin is a mystery, which is why I always specify that the mechanism may have been invented by your God. This is the unworthy digression you always indulge in when I challenge your version of how evolution works and of what your God’s purpose might be. That is why I put on my theist’s hat, so that we can begin with the same basic premise.

DAVID: The fossil record leaps and jumps. Why don't you restart your thinking from that point of view? I find the basic footprints of your theories planted firmly in mid air.

If your God was capable of preprogramming every leap and jump 3.8 billion years ago, I’m sure he was also capable of producing a mechanism that would do its own leaping and jumping. Once more: I am not excluding your God. I am challenging your hypothesis that your God designed every twig on the higgledy-piggledy bush, and that he did so in order to fulfil his primary purpose of producing the human brain.