Evolution and humans: Neanderthal lungs larger (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 14, 2018, 10:01 (2200 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Since we simply go round and round I've limited my response to this section:

DAVID: You do not understand advanced planning by leaving out phenotype changes in speciation.

dhw: Yet again: I propose that speciation takes place IN RESPONSE to new conditions and not before those conditions exist (advanced planning), and it hardly needs to be said that speciation involves phenotype changes!

DAVID: Blithely skipping again that fact that phenotypic changes require huge alterations of body parts, and require design.

Dealt with over and over again, as under “birth canal”. Of course speciation involves alterations of body parts, small or huge. And design does not have to mean your God preprogramming or personally dabbling every change in advance of the conditions that require or allow change. We go round and round because you keep repeating the same points and ignoring my responses to them.

DAVID: So if we start with Lucy, we have huge bodily changes to explain: bony changes in form, shifted muscle attachments, and the pelvic/birth problem added to it. The whales are more difficult to explain because of the additional physiological problems of a mammal living in water. This cannot happen by chance. Design is required.

dhw: Dealt with over and over again, and please stop erecting the straw man of chance, which I have never advocated.

DAVID: The point is design, not chance, is all I stated. If you reject chance you are forced to accept design.

But (yet again) I am not forced to accept that design is carried out in advance of the conditions for which the changes are made. And I am not forced to accept that your God does all the designing by preprogramming or personally dabbling every change. And I am not forced to accept that he does all this designing in order to fulfil the purpose of producing H. sapiens.

DAVID: I am convinced God designed the start of life. You are totally illogical, because chance development of life and consciousness from the inorganic doesn't make any sense. Only minds design.

dhw: Yet again: the theistic version of my hypothesis is precisely that: your God may have designed the START of life, and I cannot believe in the chance development of life and consciousness from the inorganic, and that is a major reason why I am not an atheist. And yet again you are using your belief in God’s existence (through the perfectly logical design argument) to dodge having to defend your illogical version of how and why your God designed evolution, i.e. by specially designing every single innovation etc., extant and extinct, although his purpose was to produce H. sapiens.

DAVID: Repeating the word illogical answers nothing. Many others and I see logic.

First you accuse me of being illogical by erecting a straw man (you know perfectly well that I do NOT believe in a chance origin of life and consciousness), and then you dodge the issue (yet again) of why your God would personally design every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder extant and extinct if his purpose was to produce the brain and body of H. sapiens. In fairness, however, you did offer “experimentation” as a logical explanation, but when I pointed out that this meant either your God didn’t know what he wanted, or he knew what he wanted but didn’t know how to get it, you dismissed the idea and scurried back to your God’s logic being different from ours. If you refuse to accept a logical explanation, and cannot come up with another logical explanation that you find acceptable, then you can hardly blame me for attacking your logic, or for pointing out that if your God’s logic is different from “ours”, that is an acknowledgement that you can’t find a logical explanation!