Innovation, Speciation: strange DNA finding (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, December 03, 2018, 14:10 (2181 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I have absolutely no problem with your position concerning design. […] It is your position as regards your God’s purposes and methods that I find problematical.

DAVID: I've explained my positions as coming from my personal studies. And I am totally comfortable with them. You keep hunting for God's motives underlying the results of His creation. I never did until you pushed me, since it doesn't matter to me. I may be the wrong foil for you. Tony miht offer different help.

We have spent years debating your belief that your God personally designed every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder extant and extinct in order to fulfil his one and only purpose: to produce humans who would think about him. You have now agreed that all these varieties are not stepping stones to humans, but exist or existed only as parts of changing econiches and nothing more. God’s “motives underlying the results of His creation” means his purpose, and throughout our discussions, you have insisted that God is purposeful in all he does. But now you are only interested in his purpose for creating you and me, which is to think about him (a nice example of humanization). Throughout the years I am delighted to say you have also presented ideas and especially information to me that I might never have thought about or known in the past. That is indeed the function of this forum. However, you don’t like me presenting you with ideas that you might never have thought about before. And so suddenly your God’s purpose and method for the whole of life and evolution don’t matter any more.

DAVID: Because of your position outside belief, you started this site to explore agnosticism, and have asked me questions you have, which I don't consider important to my decision.

dhw: I did not start this site to explore agnosticism! I started it to explore all the fundamental questions which agnostics cannot answer, in the hope that a public forum might shed light on some of the mysteries...The questions I have asked you concern your fixed belief that your God designed every single innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life, that innovations were designed before needed, and that every variety of life was a stepping stone to the brain and body of H. sapiens. You would hardly have come up with these hypotheses if they were not important to you.

DAVID: Design is the key to my acceptance of God. My hypotheses all fit as God, the Designer with a goal of humans through evolution. What we know about evolution fits my hypothesis and faith.

I accept the design argument. I do not see how your God’s special design of 50,000 spiders’ webs, whale fins and weaverbirds’ nests fits the hypothesis that every variety of life is/was a stepping stone to humans. Nor do you, which is why you now say that all these varieties serve/served to provide energy for life, and nothing more. But this would be true even if there were no humans, and so we are still faced with the problem below.

DAVID: Since only we recognize God exists, and that creates a special relationship, why should we search for other motives? I'm not.

Again, that would make sense if we were the only organism that God specially designed. But according to you, he also specially designed every other species, lifestyle and natural wonder extant and extinct. Why would he specially design all of them if what he wanted was us? I offer you possible answers: he didn’t specially design all of them, or we were not his one and only purpose, or we (with our self-awareness) were his only purpose but he didn’t know how to make us, or we came late on in his thinking. All of these fit the history of life as we know it, and they bridge the enormous gap in your hypothesis.

dhw: I have explained why I find your hypotheses illogical, while you have explained why you find my own hypothesis unlikely (which I accept to the extent that there is no proof) but have not yet pointed out any logical flaw in the thinking.

DAVID: You have wandered far afield but many suppositions about God's motives can seem logical since our knowledge of God comes mainly from religious pronouncements, which are just human thoughts.

We have no knowledge of God, and that extends even as far as his existence. All we have are our human thoughts, and all we can do is test their logic in our human way. Your thoughts about design are 100% logical. But you would rather not discuss the logic of your hypothesis concerning his purpose and method for evolution.