Evolution and humans: all over Africa (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, October 19, 2017, 12:47 (2590 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: It is my belief God is more serious in his purposefulness than you do. Watching spectacle is a fun and games approach.

Go to the theatre or concert hall, and tell me Shakespeare’s King Lear or Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder are fun and games. The whole of life is one vast mixture of good and bad, funny and serious, beautiful and ugly. See below on the subject of “serious” purpose.

dhw: Why are the human brain and hand “over-improvement”? I find mine quite useful actually.
DAVID: Of course you do. But the apes have survived with all their clumsiness.

And bacteria and whales and the duck-billed platypus have also survived. How does that make my brain and hand an “over-improvement”?

dhw: 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?
DAVID: 'Possible dabbles' are watching, guiding and correcting. God in control.

Of course possible dabbles would be God in control. Those would be individual events (like Chixculub), not every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder. One of the great advantages of my hypothesis is precisely that it leaves room both for God and for dabbles, but it also accounts for the uncontrolled (i.e. higgledy-piggledy) bush.

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?
dhw: 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.
DAVID: You got rid of whales in your discussion so I suggested imagining evolution without apes.

We both believe humans and apes descended from a common ancestor, but I can easily imagine evolution without apes AND without humans. If it hadn’t been for Chixculub, there might never have been any primates. Stroke of luck? Your God doing a dabble? Who knows? But I’m not disputing evolution! I’m disputing the relevance of your “balance of nature” argument to your insistence that the whole of evolution was geared to the production of humans.

DAVID: I logically interpret history as I see it.
dhw: ...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?
DAVID: Explained above. He is a more serious personality in achieving His purposes.

I’m envious of your personal acquaintance with him, but so far the only serious purposes you have come up with are that he wants us to think of him, and he wants to have a relationship with us (although he remains hidden), and so he had to create/preprogramme eight stages of whale and the weaverbird’s nest and the duck-billed platypus, because how else could an all-powerful God have kept life going until he produced the one thing he really wanted to produce? And you claim that this is a logical interpretation of history.