Evolution: materialism explanation doesn't work (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, October 11, 2018, 11:52 (2017 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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.

dhw: 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: All you have pointed out is individuals die, which doesn't prove evolution by natural selection. Balance of nature adjusts to the types of individuals existing in an area. None of this provides a compass for the advance of life's evolution.

Species die! I have never supported “evolution by natural selection”! Natural selection does not explain innovation, it only determines which organs/organisms SURVIVE! I don’t know why you keep trying to disagree with a statement we have agreed on over and over again. And balance of nature does not “provide food for all”. It simply keeps adjusting itself according to which organisms can survive in which environments. As you say, nothing to do with “the advance of life’s evolution”, which depends on innovation.

Dhw: 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.

dhw: 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!

DAVID: I've never supported mindless energy as first cause. God is first cause as a designing mind of pure energy. Give me the date and content of the quote you have scissored out of something to create a meaning I have never supported.

Of course you’ve never supported it. The mindless combination is the alternative first cause I keep proposing and repeated on Tuesday 9 October, as you yourself quoted above (now in bold), whereas the straw man alternative you attacked was a “total void” (also bolded), which I have never proposed but which you used to criticize my "irrational circular thinking". You tangled the thread - but it's not worth pursuing.