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

by dhw, Wednesday, November 28, 2018, 12:21 (2185 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: 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: I view humans as the desired endpoint. I must repeat the very logical point, which you accept, that life must eat until humans appear and keep eating afterward. It explains also the need for the bush of life and diversity in econiches. Why you have trouble with the idea that ongoing evolution requires energy along the way is beyond me, if you recognize that the current endpoint in humans.

I don’t think any evolutionist would disagree that all life requires food, you can’t have evolution without life, and so humans, mosquitoes, elephants and the duckbilled platypus could not have evolved if life had not continued. But this does not depend on recognizing that we are the current endpoint, and it certainly doesn’t mean that trilobites, brontosauruses, 50,000 spider webs, whales and the weaverbird’s nest were/are steppingstones 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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: I've said the arrival of humans with consciousness.

Yes, but if your God is purposeful, he must have had a purpose for producing humans with consciousness, and it is not unreasonable to suppose that he would have had a logical way of achieving that purpose.

dhw: And what is “pure” purpose? Purpose without any definable purpose?

DAVID: A single goal.

So what do you think was your God’s single goal in specially designing 50,000 spider webs, eight stages of whale, the weaverbird’s nest, Neanderthal lungs and the brain of Homo sapiens?

Xxxxx

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

dhw: 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: 'Common sense' that the fit will survive is not proof that survivability plays a role in evolution to the next species. The gaps and the fact that species 'look like islands in the ocean' with this study of DNA enforces the point.

If the environment changes, it is commonsense that organisms will try to survive. You said that “survivability did not make mammals take to water”, and I offered a commonsense scenario: food was short on land but plentiful in the water, and so in order to survive, pre-whales took to water. Why do you find this less commonsensical than the proposal that mammals did not need to take to water until God turned their legs into fins and told them to start swimming?

DAVID: 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.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: Free will is not a mechanism but an attribute of the human brain. Do you make choices every day or not?

Actually, since you claim to be a dualist, I’d have thought free will was an attribute of the soul and not the brain. But we’d better not re-open that can of worms. The brain is a mechanism. If you think free will is a product of that mechanism, then that’s fine. So if you think your God can invent a mechanism for humans which in turn produces free will, why shouldn’t he create a mechanism for other organisms which in turn produces free innovation? In answer to your question, I myself believe in free will but recognize that there is a strong case for not believing in it.