Evolution and humans: all over Africa (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, October 17, 2017, 18:46 (2592 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You attack my suggestion that he created a spectacle for himself as “humanizing”. It is no more “humanizing” than your own suggestions.
DAVID: Spectacle is pure humanizing. Look at our history: from gladiators in ancient Rome to cricket to soccer today we create sports for entertainment. What if God is pure purpose. More logical than your humanizing approach.

What is “pure purpose”? You tell us human consciousness is part of God’s, which “must be somewhat similar to ours”, you are pretty convinced that he watches his creation with interest, and you believe that he produced us because he wants us to think of him and to have a relationship with him, but you can’t see that this is just as “human” a purpose as wanting to create an ever changing bush of life that he can watch with interest.

DAVID: What I see in the history of evolution is over-improvement. First multicellularity. The in humans such as our hand ability, our brain. Therefore a drive to complexity. If 99% of all have disappeared, survival is not a major point, just Darwin's supposition.

Why are the human brain and hand “over-improvement”? I find mine quite useful actually. As you so rightly say, “evolution requires responses to challenges for survival”, and you agree that improvement can refer to chances of survival, and we can observe that all life forms do whatever they can to survive, so I don’t know why survival “is not a major point”. The fact that 99% fail to make it just goes to show what a higgledy-piggledy process it is, as opposed to everything being meticulously preprogrammed or dabbled.

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.
dhw: 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: I used inanimate in the sense of mentation. You are strictly right. The fudge is God's secondary mechanism in your hypothesis is still God in control.

Some scientists think that all living cells are capable of a form of mentation. You insist that your God controlled every phase of evolution, and my theistic hypothesis is that he chose NOT to control it but to allow it to pursue its own course (with possible dabbles). What is unclear (fudgy) about that?

dhw: 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.
DAVID: Of course without whales the balance would be different, but still balanced. But the whales are HERE. We are dealing with an evolutionary history presented to us to interpret. Should we get rid of great apes in discussing how humans appeared?

I keep saying that so long as there is life, there is some kind of balance, regardless of whether there were/are/will be whales or no whales, humans or no humans. I don’t understand your question about apes. We both believe that whales descended from pre-whales, humans descended from pre-humans, and presumably the duck-billed platypus descended from pre-duckbilled platypuses. What is your point?

DAVID: I logically interpret history as I see it. It tells me it needs a planning brain, which you, illogically, can't accept. You overuse the word 'logic', amazingly, as a supposed defense.

I accept as logical that some form of intelligence (I didn’t know you thought your God had a brain) may have designed the mechanism that created evolutionary history. I see no logic in the claim that every twig of evolution’s higgledy-piggledy bush was planned 3.8 billion years ago to keep life going for the sake of humans, which is why I propose that if your God exists, his “plan” was to produce a higgledy-piggledy bush, and not just one particular species. You keep acknowledging that you can’t explain the higgledy-piggledy course to the fulfilment of his prime purpose, but then you trot out “balance of nature”, which explains nothing except that all life requires some form of balance. And most important of all, you keep acknowledging that my hypothesis fits the history and answers all the questions you cannot answer. Why are you so afraid to acknowledge the possibility that your God wanted to create the ever-changing spectacle of life’s history, which he watches with interest?