Innovation, Speciation: strange DNA finding (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, December 08, 2018, 10:00 (2176 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: [...] 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.

dhw: 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: How can I know why God chose evolution instead of direct creation? That is the evidence presented. I've offered the very logical reason that life has to eat and the diversity supplies the energy for evolutionary time to pass. Instead you are totally illogical about a gap I don't see. What gap?

Once more: you insist that he personally designed 50,000 spider webs, baleens, the weaverbird’s nest, plus 3+ billion years’ worth of innovations, econiches, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct, so that everything could eat everything else to keep life going while time passed. But his sole purpose was to produce us so that we would think about him and have a relationship with him. With the full control you attribute to him, you say he could have achieved his purpose directly, and so you don’t know why he chose to create us in this manner. The bit that you don’t know is the gap. And I have suggested several ways in which you can do away with it, but you continue to ignore them (see below).

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Once again you want me to read God's mind, while no one can, even though you keep trying.

It is your reading of your God’s mind that I keep challenging, but (a) you don’t seem to realize that when you specify your God’s purpose you are trying to read his mind, and (b) you persist in refusing to recognize that your reading of his mind makes no sense in relation to the method you propose. You admit that you can’t link the two together but you still won’t admit that this represents a gap in your reasoning!

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Once again, God can create humans by any method He wishes. He obviously chose an evolutionary process.

You and I agree that evolution took place. But if you can’t see any way in which the method fits the purpose, there might just possibly be a fault in your interpretation of one or both. Hence the above proposals, which you continue to ignore. May I presume you can’t find any logical flaw in them?

DAVID: Accept God's obvious method and there is no gap, except in your thinking which insists upon entering His mind for an exact purpose. […]

You are not asking me to accept your God’s method. You are asking me to accept your interpretation of evolution as a means of fulfilling your interpretation of your God’s intentions, even though you yourself can’t find any way to link the method and the exact, anthropocentric purpose which YOU impose on him.