Innovation, Speciation: strange DNA finding (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, December 07, 2018, 13:34 (2177 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

DAVID: 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.

It is you who are not logical to me! Your illogical reading of your God’s mind is that his sole purpose was to produce H. sapiens in order to have a relationship with us, he could have done so directly but instead he chose to specially create millions of other life forms, econiches, lifestyles and natural wonders, and you don’t know why. But you deny that there is a gap in your reasoning.

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?

DAVID: 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.

Niches are needed to feed life. This has always been so, is still so, and will continue to be so, and up until now evolution has reached the stage of whales, weaverbirds’ nests, 50,000 spider webs, the duckbilled platypus and humans. And so once more: this does not explain why your God specially created millions of niches extant and extinct when his sole purpose was to produce H.sapiens which, according to you, he could have done directly and you don't know why he "chose" not to.

dhw: 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”.

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

Here once more are four theistic proposals to stop you “floundering around” as you fail to explain why your God specially designed millions of life forms etc. instead of doing what he actually wanted to do:
1) he didn’t specially design all of them, 2) we were not his one and only purpose, 3) we (with our self-awareness) were his only purpose but he didn’t know how to make us, 4) 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. Do please explain why you find them illogical, but please don’t bother to tell us why they remind you of Darwin.