Evolution and humans: Neanderthal lungs larger (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 07, 2018, 12:24 (2206 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: As for God knowing what He wants, you've forgotten that God used evolution to produce all the results we see.

dhw: If your God exists, I am happy with this. The result that we see is an ever changing spectacle of life forms extant and extinct, which suggests to me that your God wanted an ever changing spectacle of life forms extant and extinct.

DAVID: As before, purposefully useful for balance of nature.

dhw: As before, the balance of nature constantly changes as life forms come and go. How can an ever changing balance of nature be useful for balance of nature?

DAVID: Balance of nature is not useful for itself, which I view as a strange off the point comment. Any presently existing balance of nature supplies energy for on -going evolution which takes time to create new forms.

The ever changing spectacle is an ever changing balance, it is not “useful for” balance. All you are telling us is that life requires energy, and evolution has gone on for a long time. That does not explain why your God specially designed 50,000 webs and Neanderthal lungs when his purpose was to produce the brain and body of H. sapiens.

DAVID: The operation of an evolutionary system allows experimentation in many directions. We have only one result to study, but I can imagine others leading to H. sapiens, with different diverse organisms in a different sets of balances of nature.

dhw: What are you saying now? Experimentation implies either that you want a particular result and don’t know how to get it, or you are trying out new things to see what they will lead to. Your last remark suggests that your God specially designed 50,000 different spider webs in the hope that they would somehow lead to his longed-for H. sapiens. (The alternative would be that he designed them to see what would happen as a result.) And you absolutely refuse to consider the possibility that spiders, using their possibly God-given intelligence, simply designed their own webs to give themselves the best chance of catching their prey.

DAVID: Why can't I 'absolutely refuse' to believe tiny spider brains can design for the future?

You can of course believe or refuse to believe whatever you like or don’t like. I am just surprised that you can believe your God designed 50,000 webs in the hope that they would lead to H. sapiens, whereas you can’t believe that he might have given spiders the ability to design their own webs in order to catch their prey.

DAVID: All I have said is God may have tried out different approaches on his way to Humans. I have no idea how rigidly He followed a direct plan or a more fluid one.

If he tried out different approaches, either he didn’t know what he wanted, or he knew what he wanted but didn’t know how to get it. I don’t know how a direct plan would result in billions of life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct, including 50,000 spider webs and Neanderthal lungs, and I really don’t see how they would result even from a fluid plan to produce H. sapiens. Perhaps it would be best if you followed the principle you keep trying to impose on me, and abandoned all your attempts to read your God’s mind, which would save you the trouble of saddling him with a purpose which you can only link to life’s history by claiming that your God’s logic is different from ours.