Innovation, Speciation: strange DNA finding (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 06, 2018, 19:09 (2177 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: I see no logical gap. I have no way of knowing why He chose stepwise evolution instead of direct creation a'la the Bible.

dhw: You can’t find a logical link between your two hypotheses, but you see no gap. I’d hate to be your passenger when you try to drive your car across a river without a bridge.

I'm not Teddy Kennedy. You have the link problem. I don't try to read God's mind as you keep trying to do. I guess God is not logical to you, but we see what He did, and taht is what I accept.

DAVID: You have not offended me. You are entering an area of supposition which I do not think is worth pursuing since no reasonable conclusions are possible.

dhw: Thank you. Unfortunately you have reached two conclusions, and they are so contradictory that you cannot explain them. And yet you regard them as reasonable. I offered you four reasonable conclusions (repeated in yesterday’s post), you have yet to query the logic of any of them, but you prefer to ignore them.

See above

dhw: 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: I see my hypotheses are tying together, right or wrong. Life cannot evolve unless it eats all along the way. God creates what He needs to create.

dhw: You admit that you can’t find a way of tying your hypotheses together, yes all life depends on food, and if your God exists, I suggest he creates what he wants to create. Why “needs” to create?

You refuse to tie together the need for niches to feed life for the length of time for evolution to reach the human stage. God saw the need for them and created them as part of His plan. Totally logical.

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Well, that is clear and logical as a disagreement. You are still with Darwin, and I am not.

dhw: Nothing to do with Darwin, and I wish you would stick to the point and stop relying on the word “Darwin” to distract attention from the arguments! See the “Neanderthal thread”.

Unless you accept a designer you are left floundering around with hypotheses that remind me directly of Darwin.