Evolution: materialism explanation doesn't work (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 10, 2018, 09:29 (2236 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Natural selection, we have agreed a thousand times, only explains why innovations survive, not how they come into being.

DAVID: I don't think we have agreed to anything more than natural selection is a tautology. It is a term that implies life struggles to exist when we see extremeophiles that disprove the point. And so called competition for survival is a misinterpretation of the neat balance of nature that provides food for all.

dhw: I don’t know what world you live in. The “neat balance” of nature has constantly changed and is even changing today because nature does not provide food for all. Habitats change, and 90+% of species have gone extinct. There is and always has been competition for survival, and today it is humans and bacteria that are winning the competition hands down. But competition is not the only factor that has driven evolution. Cooperation has been equally important. Natural selection simply determines which organisms survive. Don't you agree?

DAVID: No. Natural selection is a supposition for competition culling inadequately fit life. Never proven. Of course the balance always changes as life and earth continue to evolve their balanced relationship. Homeostasis requires constant adjustments.

Natural selection: you think it’s never been proven that organisms die if starved of food (i.e. those that are able to get food survive, those that can’t, die.)

Balance of nature: “the neat balance of nature provides food for all”, except that it doesn’t, which is why the balance of nature constantly changes.

DAVID: From the back of the room: God is eternal! You can't get something from nothing!

dhw: If life and consciousness have to be designed, it makes no sense to claim that a living, conscious God does not have to be designed. If you can’t get something from nothing, and if your God is an existing something, he can’t have come from nothing. It’s your first cause argument all over again, and it requires as much irrational faith to believe that a conscious mind has always been there as it does to believe that consciousness arose by chance out of mindless combinations of energy and matter that have always been there.

DAVID: Non-existence in a total void cannot create something, Therefore something has to be eternal. We are something and therefore something has always exited. Your irrational circular thinking needs rethinking.

The alternative first cause I have proposed is not a total void! You have even quoted me: “mindless combinations of energy and matter that have always been there.” Please read what you quote before pretending your straw man is mine!