Evolution and humans: all over Africa (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, October 15, 2017, 15:12 (2594 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Of course His consciousness must be somewhat similar to ours. [...]

dhw: 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.

We are arguing over a mater of degree. The mechanism of his consciousness is similar, but the thought content may be entirely different.

dhw: 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.)[/i]
DAVID: Your parenthetical sentence is right on point.

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

Not so. As stated before the 'survival of the fittest' concept is circular reasoning.

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

dhw: 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.

I mean inanimate. I view early living cells as inanimate. You are again offering God in charge, but in a secondary way. Fudge factor.

DAVID: We back to arguing about balance of nature which you accept and reject at the same time.

dhw: 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.

Which gets us back to the observation, if God created life, starting with inorganic matter, why didn't He just produce humans with their brains? He chose to evolve them. The question you should answer is was evolution chosen or required? I pick chosen.

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.

dhw: 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.

I'm the guy who presented the whales. I see what seems unreasonable, but find what I think are reasonable answers, such as balance of nature in the oceans. Balance of nature is feeding homeostasis, a continuous process as you admit. Life itself in all organisms is a continuous homeostasis or it can't continue. It requires a continuous biochemical mechanism of struggle to maintain everything in a body in upper and lower limits of a normal range.