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

by dhw, Tuesday, November 27, 2018, 15:52 (2186 days ago) @ David Turell

I am combining the “Immunity” thread with this one, as they cover the same ground.

dhw: Your own reading of his mind – that he created 50,000 spider webs etc. etc. in order to produce humans – makes no sense even to you, which is why you keep telling us his logic is different from ours.

DAVID: [..] I make sense to me. Stop denigrating my thought processes. Again slighting my view: the diversity provides econiche supplies of food so life can survive for all the time evolution took.

Once more, I am NOT disputing the fact that diversity supplies food for ALL forms of life, and life has survived for 3.X billion years so far. The thought process I challenge is your claim that this obvious fact is related to your claim that “all of the varieties of life produced through evolution are steppingstones to humans”.

DAVID: "Unrelated"! without the energy supply from econiches we wouldn't have evolved to be here. […]

Without the energy supply from econiches, NO form of life would be here. That does not mean that every form of life was and is a stepping stone to humans!

DAVID: You illogically want HIM to view spectacles. You've constantly downgraded God to a human level. Of course God is logical in His own purposeful way.

There is no point in insisting on God’s logic and purpose if you then refuse to consider what that logic and purpose might be.

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”. […]

DAVID: 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. […]

Of course you are using human reasoning. What else can you use? Elsewhere you tell us our consciousness is part of your God’s consciousness, so can’t our consciousness be an image of his consciousness? And what is “pure” purpose? Purpose without any definable purpose? You keep telling us that his purpose in creating life was to create H. sapiens. I’m sorry, but I still can’t see any logical connection between that statement and the fact that all life needs energy to survive and evolution has gone on for 3.X billion years.

Xxxxx

DAVID: Your dependency on Darwin is shown by the fact that you still cling to an unproven theory […] that survivability plays a role in advancing evolution. Survivability did not make mammals take to water.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: See my entry to answer Tony: under strange DNA finding.

You have not commented at all on the survivability argument above.

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

I agree that luck also plays a part: those organisms that were lucky enough to have the means of coping with or exploiting environmental change were able to survive. How does that answer my point that survivability is pure common sense, as above, with an illustration as to how it might work?

DAVID: (re God giving up control) No one in the religions agrees with you […]

dhw: […] I have given you a full answer to your question about control, but you don’t like it so you dismiss it as “humanizing”.

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

It does not make him human. It gives him characteristics in common with humans, as proposed by all the religions you are now so fond of.

dhw: [..] 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?

DAVID: 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.

Free will is not a fact, but that’s beside the point. My question was: if he can invent a mechanism for free will, why shouldn’t he invent a mechanism for innovation? It is no answer to say I have no proof. There is no more proof for your favourite theories than for my hypothesis.