dhw: Evolution and humans: Neanderthal lungs larger (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, November 26, 2018, 19:48 (2187 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Niches provide energy, and so far evolution has lasted for 3.X billion years – not “so evolution can take…”. Who knows what may evolve in the next few billion years? But this has nothing whatsoever to do with your explicit belief that “all varieties produced through evolution are steppingstones to humans”! That is the patently obvious unrelatedness of your earlier statement.

"Unrelated"! without the energy supply from econiches we wouldn't have evolved to be here.The diversity of the bush of life is a required plan of development.

DAVID: You have again talked your way around the fact that you constantly humanize god.

dhw: You asked me for a logical purposeful activity, and I gave you one. It is quite impossible to describe purpose without humanizing – which is why when pressed you have your God watching us with interest, wanting a relationship with us, testing us etc. - and there is no reason to suppose that our own consciousness does not in some ways mirror his own (according to some religions, we are “made in his image”. See my response under “Immunity”.) But “humanizing” is your constant get-out whenever you ask me for purpose and don’t like my response.

Of course, I'll guess at His reasoning when you ask me, but I recognize I am using human reasoning when I search for a reason that what might be His motives. I primarily view Him as pure purpose in what He does. 'Spectacle' is well beyond that view.

DAVID: Your dependency on Darwin is shown by the fact that you still cling to an unproven theory behind the evolutionary mechanism he envisioned, that survivability plays a role in advancing evolution. Survivability did not make mammals take to water.

dhw: How the heck do you know that? Hypothesis: food was short on land but plentiful in the water, so some mammals took to water. Is that less logical than God’s purpose was humans, and so he gave some land-dwelling mammals fins to enable them to enter the water? Survivability is pure common sense. All organisms fight to survive, and if conditions change, either they adapt or they die. My hypothesis goes one step further: adaptation in order to survive may extend to innovation in order to improve chances of survival.

See my entry to answer Tony: under strange DNA finding

DAVID: I would remind you that a firm Darwinist David Raup devoted a whole book to this issue and concluded, survival depended on luck! Still sticking to Darwin.

dhw: You have ignored the whole of my response. Why don’t you stick to the point? You are talking to me, not to David Raup.

How do you know Raup doesn't contain the answer from my wide-spread research to formulate my opinions,. ?

DAVID: And I would again ask, why you envision a God who gives up control? No one in the religions agrees with you. Remember you are reinterpreting their God.

dhw: As for religion, firstly it is not “their” God. There are all kinds of religions with all kinds of gods, and deists who believe God initiated creation but then let it run its own course have just as much right to their views as Jews and Christians, Muslims and Hindus, and the Dogon and the Yanomami. Secondly, I have given you a full answer to your question about control, but you don’t like it so you dismiss it as “humanizing”.

It makes Him human. There is no other way of characterizing your imagination of Him.

dhw: Thirdly, you have always prided yourself on your independence from established religion, but in any case the main focus of the monotheistic religions (like the main focus of your view of evolution) is on humans, and if I remember rightly, you are a firm believer in human free will. How can we have free will if your God doesn’t give up control? And if he can invent a mechanism for free will, why shouldn't he invent a mechanism for free innovation?

Neat sidestep. Human free will is the only freedom God has obviously allowed. You can extrapolate all you want without any proof but you are back to your favorite theories. Free will is my fact to stand with, nothing more.