Innovation, Speciation: strange DNA finding (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, December 03, 2018, 17:20 (2180 days ago) @ dhw

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 might offer different help.

dhw: 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.

I have never changed from my positions. I have been pleased to educate you, and in politeness (as previously noted) have tried to respond to your inquires into God's mind. But you have reached a point in trying to humanize God's thought process and I've never gone there. I've concentrated on the science of reality as looking at 'how' God did what he did, without wondering about the 'why' He did it. I've spent most of my time exposing you to the design argument. I'm simply telling you I am in foreign territory, to which I object constantly, while criticizing your humanizing approach.

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.

dhw: 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.

You are stressing the word 'steppingstone' too strongly. All stages of evolution and diversity are steps to reaching humans, nothing more. The diversity of design of living forms is to set up delicate econiches to provide food, nothing more, for life to survive the lengthy process of evolving life with humans as the current and probably last endpoint. From what I have presented, do you doubt about the delicacy of econiche balances?

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

dhw: 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.

Those econiches are designed to provide energy. I don't know why God chose to evolve humans, when religions, if correct, tell us He could do anything He wanted. The Bible tries to tell us He made Adam from dirt. Maybe the evolutionary process was the only way He could do it. I've said this before.

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.

dhw: 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.

I use what I see science present to explain the design that is obvious. God's mind is a black box to me.