autonomy v. automaticity (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, April 01, 2018, 11:05 (2427 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Your original “non-religious thought”, quoted above, was that you had no way of knowing whether your God was in full control. Thank you for now acknowledging the equal possibility that he WANTED to lose control. That is just as purposeful as the deliberate or accidental creation of bad viruses, but the purpose of course would not be the targeted production of the sapiens brain. It would be the ever varying spectacle of the evolutionary bush, with organisms coming and going as they autonomously attempt to work out their own ways of coping with changing conditions. (Your God could, of course, dabble if he wanted to.) And I still don’t know why you are so resolutely opposed to this hypothesis, which fits in perfectly with the history of evolution as we know it.

DAVID: You and I differ on the degree of God's purposefulness. God created the universe and evolved it. God created the Earth as a perfect planet for life to appear, and evolved it. And finally He evolved the human brain. A clear succession of purpose and result.

Not the “degree” of purpose. The purpose itself. Millions of other life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct also evolved (a clear succession of purpose and result if your God set the process in motion), and how the heck you know that evolution has now finished is beyond me. Let’s meet in a few billion years from now, and see what life has to offer before we use the word “finally”.