Evolution and humans: all over Africa (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, October 15, 2017, 09:01 (2595 days ago) @ David Turell

These posts are getting very long, so I am editing them in order to pinpoint the main issues.

DAVID: Adler's statement is obviously true. God is NOT like us. […] He is not human!
Dhw: If God exists, of course he’s not human! I don’t imagine him as an old man with a beard. But if, as you keep telling us, our consciousness is part of his consciousness, and he wants a relationship with us, and he has purpose, and, as the Bible tells us, he made us in his image, it is far from improbable that our consciousness bears similarities to his consciousness.
DAVID: Of course His consciousness must be somewhat similar to ours. [...]

If “of course his consciousness must be somewhat similar to ours”, then your statement “God is NOT like us” clearly doesn’t refer to his consciousness, and so it is perfectly legitimate to extrapolate from his works what you like to call “humanizing” attributes. It is not legitimate, however, to dismiss my speculations because they “humanize” God, while at the same time offering your own “humanizing” speculations.

dhw: 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.
DAVID: Your statement about 'survival' is a suspect thesis.
dhw: You wrote: “evolution requires responses to challenges to survival”. I’m sorry you don’t agree with yourself. But I agree that ‘improvement’ is more to the point when it comes to innovations, though it is sometimes difficult to draw the line between the two. (Improvement can be related to chances of survival as well as to opportunities provided by environmental change.)
DAVID: Your parenthetical sentence is right on point.

Therefore your statement that my statement about ‘survival’ is a suspect thesis is right off point.

DAVID: And what gives inanimate organisms the ability to improve themselves?

I presume you mean animate organisms. There would be no point in having the intelligence to improve if they didn’t have the ability to do it! Your God may have designed the whole mechanism.

DAVID: It is obvious God uses evolutionary processes to achieve His goals.
dhw: If God exists, then of course you are right. The question mark is over your personal interpretation of his goals. If his prime goal was the production of the brain of Homo sapiens, why did he bother to design eight stages of whale and the weaverbird’s nest?
DAVID: We back to arguing about balance of nature which you accept and reject at the same time.

I accept that so long as there is life, there must be some kind of balance to enable living creatures to survive. That balance has constantly changed. I do not accept that your God specially designed eight stages of whale, the weaverbird’s nest, and a toxin-swallowing snake in order to keep different life forms coming and going (= the ever changing balance of nature) until he could fulfil his prime purpose of producing the human brain.

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.
DAVID: I have answers you do not accept, but satisfy me, which led to faith.

Over and over again you have admitted you do NOT have the answers. I gave you a quote a couple of days ago: “Evolution, survival and adaptation”, 1 October at 14.37:
“My not delving into your thought processes of God’s purposes is I find many of your questions unanswerable as I have stated....” Here’s another from the same post, referring to my guesses: “Yours make me think, but if I have no answer to your questions, it is generally because I don’t see how to reach one I can believe.” But you believe in a guess that raises questions you can’t answer! My guess answers all those questions, to which you can only reply that God’s logic is different from ours. Maybe it isn’t.