Evolution and humans: big brain size uses energy (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, November 24, 2017, 13:42 (2554 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your approach turns God into a spectator of His creation which He enjoys, I assume. I avoid humanizing Him as much as I can considering I think as a human and He is a personality like no other personality, i.e., not a human personality.

dhw: But you have acknowledged in the past that he and we may well share certain characteristics. You “avoid humanizing him” because although you believe he is full of purpose, you would rather not tell us what you think that purpose might be. However, when pressed, you speculate that he wants us to think about him, wants a relationship with us, watches us with interest (= God as spectator), and I recall that some time ago his creation of nasty things was a means of making us use the intelligence he has given us (also fits in nicely with the spectacle hypothesis). But looming over all these humanizing (and why not, if our consciousness is part of his?) speculations is your insistence that the purpose behind the whole history of life is US. As we keep seeing, this interpretation of evolution leads you into a labyrinth of anomalies which you cannot escape from, and yet you still refuse to consider an alternative THEISTIC interpretation which would give you a direct route out!

DAVID: I'm perfectly content with my approach. I'm sorry that you see them as anomalies from your human point of view.

I hope you’re not telling me that your approach is from your God’s point of view! I shan’t go over the anomalies again, since you have so often agreed that you can’t explain them.

DAVID: We will remain apart. You refuse to see the problem in our existence. We are not required by an evolutionary process that is considered to be the result of challenges and stresses and opportunities. Throw out Darwin evolution theory completely, accept God as in control and your problems disappear.

You refuse to see that what you call the problem in our existence applies to every other organism that developed after bacteria: none of them were “required”. But all the changes that followed on from multicellularity, including those that led to humans, can be explained by a drive for survival and/or improvement. If you throw out Darwin completely, you have to reject the heart of his theory which is common descent, and until today you have always believed in it. Throw out your insistence that you know God’s anthropocentric purpose and that he preprogammed or personally dabbled every twig of the vast bush, including the weaverbird’s nest, eight stages of whale, and the duckbilled platypus, just so he could produce us, and then all the problems of your theistic evolutionary theory (the anomalies) will disappear. But you are right that my problem of ORIGINS would disappear if I accepted God. They would also disappear if I accepted chance or atheistic panpsychism.