Evolution and humans: all over Africa (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, October 16, 2017, 13:45 (2593 days ago) @ David Turell

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

Do you really think we are talking about mechanisms? (What mechanism anyway? I thought your God was pure energy). The subject of this discussion is purpose, i.e. your God’s intentions, i.e. thought content. You speculate that your God’s prime purpose was to produce the brain of Homo sapiens so that we would think of him. (Earlier, it was so that we could have a relationship with him.) You attack my suggestion that he created a spectacle for himself as “humanizing”. It is no more “humanizing” than your own suggestions.

dhw: My hypothesis adds the drive for improvement to that for survival.
DAVID: Your statement about ‘survival’ is a suspect thesis.
dhw: […] (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.
dhw: Therefore your statement that my statement about ‘survival’ is a suspect thesis is right off point.
DAVID: Not so. As stated before the 'survival of the fittest' concept is circular reasoning.

I agree, but that was not the point we were discussing. You quite rightly wrote that “evolution requires responses to challenges for survival”. Of course it does, and I added the drive for improvement, which can mean improving chances of survival as well as taking advantage of new opportunities provided by environmental change. What is "suspect” about that?

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

Inanimate means without life, so I don’t know how living cells can be without life. There is no fudge in my hypothesis that your God deliberately created a mechanism that would enable organisms to improve themselves.

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.
DAVID: 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.

I suggest that if exists, he didn’t WANT to “just produce humans with their brains”. He wanted or "chose" to create a process that would lead to the ever changing higgledy-piggledy bush of dinosaurs, whales, weaverbirds’ nests, toxin-producing snakes and the whole vast variety, including humans. But he may have done an occasional dabble.

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'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.

You are merely repeating what I have said above: all forms of life require some sort of balance (homeostasis), or life can’t go on. The balance constantly changes. That is true whether there are humans or not. If there had been no whales, there would have been a different balance. Nothing whatsoever to do with God’s prime purpose being the production of Homo sapiens’ brain. You know “balance of nature” does not answer the questions thrown up by the illogicalities of your hypothesis, and that is why you keep admitting that you have no answers.