Evolution and humans: Neanderthal lungs larger (Evolution)

by David Turell , Saturday, November 10, 2018, 18:13 (2203 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Saturday, November 10, 2018, 18:22

I don't understand your comment about Shapiro. I find my answer on Nov. 9th. We disagree about how to interpret him, and he deserves interpretation from the standpoint of biochemistry some of which is shown by my entry of yesterday about research into the automatic physical chemistry of the cell. The workings of the single cell are showing what I expected the research to show before it was accomplished as in my book from 2004.

DAVID: I have constantly considered my thoughts as perfectly logical. I have never said I was illogical, unless you have misinterpreted what I write, which you sometimes do. You have constantly told me I am illogical to the point now where you believe I said it about myself. What are you smoking? I view your initial concepts as totally unreasonable, but have agreed your logic following the false starts have logic. So?

dhw: You cannot find any logical reason why your God chose to specially design billions of life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct if his purpose was to produce H. sapiens. One moment you have “no idea how rigidly he followed a direct plan or a more fluid one”, and the next moment, in the same post, “of course there was no direct plan”. One moment you have him experimenting, and the next moment he knows exactly what he is doing. Over and over again, in defending your hypothesis, you say your God’s logic is different from human logic, and we shouldn’t try to read God’s mind. That is not a claim that your hypothesis is logical! But over and over again you fall back on obvious truths such as evolution takes time, life requires energy, the balance of nature has to be balanced if it is to be balanced, econiches have to be balanced, econiches depend on a food chain (hence the articles about top predators), and somehow all this explains why your God specially designed Neanderthal lungs, 50,000 types of spider web and the weaverbird’s nest in order to progress to the production of H. sapiens. No it doesn’t.

DAVID : We agree life needs energy. The diversity in life and in your examples supplies that. Nothing more.

dhw: Thank you. So now please explain the logic behind your hypothesis that God specially designed them all, though his purpose was to produce the brain and body of H. sapiens. The rest of your post follows the same track, exemplified by the final exchange:

dhw: 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.

DAVID: The illogical conclusion is in your mind, not mine. The variety supplies the energy for a long living evolutionary process.

dhw: Yes, all varieties of life need energy to go on living. That does not explain why your God had to specially design every variety of life, lifestyle and natural wonder extant and extant if – as you never cease to remind us – his purpose was to produce H. sapiens.

How does life get from single cells to humans? What we accept is common descent over a very long time. And the evidence is single celled eventually became humans. And my conclusion is that it could not have happened by chance. There is no obvious reason to have advanced beyond bacteria or beyond apes. So I have logically concluded there is a drive for complexity, which I have ascribed to God. The only step in this series of thoughts is I have added God, which requires faith. As for designs in life, there are many examples
I have presented that cannot be explained by chance stepwise development. How do you know what God decided to design and what He did not design? I come the point of view that evolution was guided and designed and you don't.

xxxx

dhw: Thank you for the rest of today’s posts, which offer a fascinating variety of discoveries. (As you can imagine, I’m particularly impressed by the tool-making orang-utans!) I don’t have time to respond to these articles, but in any case, possible points of controversy (e.g. concerning cells or why your God personally designed all the different varieties of pre-sapiens) will lead us to the same points of disagreement.

Of course we disagree and there are few points of joining bridges between us.