Evolution and humans: Neanderthal lungs larger (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, November 09, 2018, 12:44 (2204 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Ignored as usual my point: balance supplies the necessary energy for life to take time to evolve. Having a spectacle is a good human view of evolution. You don't know it was God's intent to view spectacles. He needed to feed life as it evolved and diverse forms do just that.

dhw: Nobody knows your God’s intentions, but obviously evolution has so far lasted from the time life began up to the present (that is “time”), and we all know that living forms need energy to survive. Nothing whatsoever to do with designing 50,000 webs in the hope of producing Homo sapiens.

DAVID: No 'hope in producing' involved. God knew full well what He wanted, but He chose not to do it directly, but to evolve it. Webs don't equal humans, as in your belittling statement without logic, but are part of the progress.

I didn’t say webs equalled humans! What is without logic is the notion that your God wanted H. sapiens and chose to specially design 50,000 webs, large Neanderthal lungs and the weaverbird’s nest as part of the progress towards producing H. sapiens.

DAVID: I only try to interpret God's mind because you are constantly doing it at your human level of thought. Of course there was no direct plan.

dhw: So why did you say above that you had “no idea how rigidly he followed a direct plan or a more fluid one”? As for interpretation, you constantly talk of God’s purpose (which requires interpreting his mind), identify it as being the production of H. sapiens (as if that wasn’t human thought!), and then complain if I suggest an alternative.

DAVID: All I try to do is look at the very real result of human beings against all odds.

The evolution of the whale, the elephant, the duckbilled platypus and the weaverbird’s nest is also against all odds.

DAVID: All I can assume, if I conclude that God chose evolution as His method, which is obvious in that evolution happened, without entering His mind, which I cannot, His purpose was humans. All logical without knowing God's logic, which I cannot.

If God exists, clearly he chose evolution as his method – but his method to do what? You admit that you cannot understand the logic of his personally, individually dabbling or preprogramming the 50,000 webs (plus a billion other natural wonders extant and extinct) if humans were his purpose, but you refuse to consider the possibility that he might have had a different purpose and might have given spiders the intelligence to weave their own webs.

DAVID: The energy was provided. That is fact. How would you have provided it? By a different diversity or the one we see? Either way it would have provided the energy needed. The lungs, nests and webs are side issues you create, while agreeing design is necessary.

Same problem. The energy needed for what? Energy is necessary for all life forms, but that does not mean that all life forms were created for the purpose of producing H. sapiens! Yes, I believe that lungs, nests and webs must be designed, and I accept the possibility that in my hypothesis the ability of organisms to do their own designing may have been given to them by your God. I do not accept that your God personally designed them all as part of the progress towards H. sapiens, and I do not accept that an illogical explanation is more likely to be true than a logical explanation, just because we don’t know how God thinks.