Evolution and humans: all over Africa (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, October 13, 2017, 18:37 (2596 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Of course we have to speak of his personality in our human terms, but I'll stick to Adler's terminology, a person like no other person.

dhw: “He’s a person like no other person” is a cop-out. Your God watches with interest, but is too “serious” to want a spectacle, and wants us to think of him but stays hidden because...um... – all this is every bit as human as my own hypothesis, so please don’t use “humanization” as an excuse for rejecting it.

Adler's statement is obviously true. God is NOT like us. I an only guess at His reactions to His own works. So I make human guesses, but I always carefully think, He is not human!

DAVID: Sequence of my thoughts: evolution requires responses to challenges to survival. The human brain appeared for no obvious reason, compared to ape survival. The human brain is the most complex object in the universe. Not a Freudian slip. I see the purpose.

dhw: 1) You said you started with God’s purpose, but you meant to say you start with the world you observe. You can’t have two different starting points.

Of course I can! I start by looking at works with purpose in mind

dhw: 2) Nobody knows why pre-humans descended from the trees, but it is perfectly feasible that they did so in response to local environmental challenges, as opposed to your God fiddling with their anatomy in advance.

But He did fiddle. There were lumbar changes in a 23 million year old monkey, remember?

dhw: 3) Every multicellular organism, including apes, humans, whales, and weaverbirds appeared for no obvious reason, because bacteria have survived from the start. My hypothesis adds the drive for improvement to that for survival.

Your statement about 'survival' is a suspect thesis. It is not proven. Complexification or your statement 'improvement' are more to the point.

dhw: 5) The human brain is the most complex object in the world we know. (I’m afraid I don’t have access to the whole universe.) But that does not mean your God specially designed the eight stages of whale and the weaverbird’s nest in order to keep life going until he could produce it.

It is obvious God uses evolutionary processes to achieve His goals. Everything we know about evolved from a beginning, even if we do not understand the beginnings of the universe or origin on life. Sorry you can't seem to see that. Evolution take time. Complexity of the brain implies purpose to me.

DAVID: Faith may not be logical to you.

dhw: I explained to you why I do NOT admit that the purpose you extrapolate fits the history. You have no answers to my questions, and so of course your faith in the hypotheses I listed earlier does not seem logical to me. You are (quite rightly) happy enough to use logic to justify your faith in a designer. Why do you suddenly find logic unnecessary when it comes to your personal theory of God’s intentions and methods?

Because your logic about God does not understand that He is not human, and cannot be subject to human logic..