Innovation, Speciation: strange DNA finding (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 05, 2018, 11:29 (2179 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You want me to fill in guesses about God's motives. I try to be polite. I don't know them, and since I am satisfied with what He created I'm not inclined to go further. Why you want to probe into something we cannot answer is beyond my understanding.

We have spent ten years together probing into questions we cannot answer. However, you have been quite specific about your God’s motives and methods, although nobody can possibly know them: he created life in order to produce us so that we would think about him and have a relationship with him, and his method was the special design of every life form and econiche extant and extant in the history of evolution, but you don’t know why he chose this method. I have attempted to bridge this logical gap between your two hypotheses.

Dhw: 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.

DAVID: 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: You don’t know why, but you refuse to consider any of the logical answers above.

DAVID: Frankly I think you are illogical. The diversity of life must exist to supply eaten energy for life to survive for 3.5+ billion years.

I accept the obvious statement that all life supplies energy, and will do so until life ceases to exist. I also accept your argument that life and evolution provide evidence for design, with the proviso that if your God exists, it is possible (not a fact, and not even a belief) that he provided the first cells with an autonomous mechanism for design. Neither of these points is an issue. Once more: Our disagreement is over your insistence that your God specially designed every life form and econiche at every stage of evolution, you don’t know why he chose this method to fulfil his sole purpose of designing us, but you don’t want to consider any hypothesis that attempts to fill the gap in your reasoning. Perhaps we should leave it at that, as I have obviously offended you, which is the last thing I would want to do. However, what you cannot expect me to do is leave unchallenged any further statements you make in defence of your hypotheses or in opposition to my own. Below are two such comments:

DAVID (under ”Hominins later in Arabia”): Disappearance of a hominin type is not like turning off a light bulb. They die off slowly. That H. sapiens and H. erectus lived side by side suggests sapiens appeared with no intermediate forms. H. sapiens by direct creation is possible.

Yet again this raises the question of why, if you think your God was capable of direct creation of H. sapiens - his one and only purpose - he chose to specially create the whale, the 50,000 webs, the weaverbird’s nest etc. to keep life going until he could specially create us. And why all the other contemporary forms of human? You have said you don’t know, which in my view should at least leave you open to the possibility that one or other of your hypotheses is wrong.

DAVID (article on beavers): An ecological article much too long to summarize. It shows how life influences the ecology and the necessary econiches, while changing the local Earth. It answers dhw's attempt to downplay econiches.

Thank you for this interesting article, and for editing it. No thanks for the comment at the end. I have never disagreed that econiches are changing all the time, all life forms provide necessary food for other life forms, life cannot continue without energy etc. etc. The one disagreement I have with you is your fixed idea that all life forms and econiches are/were specially and individually preprogrammed/dabbled by your God, and are/were all “stepping stones” to keep life going for the sole purpose of producing humans.