Divine purposes and methods (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 19, 2018, 18:36 (2164 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Why do you think your first-cause, isolated God needed to do something that would bring him satisfaction?

We view God differently. He is purposeful in creation. He exists to create.

dhw: I accept your scientific reasons (design) for your faith that God is the creator, but with my theist hat on, I can make no sense of your highly subjective reading (totally divorced from science) of his powers, purpose, and method of achieving that purpose, the three of which you yourself cannot fit together.

I don't fit them together, just interpret what I see.

DAVID: It all fits together for me. Even in creating whales to create a very complex ecosystem in oceans.

dhw: So now God says to himself: “I want to create complex and very complex ecosystems, and these will give me satisfaction.” That’s logical enough on its own – the pleasure of creating all sorts of creatures. But it does not mean that all these complex ecosystems were designed to keep life going until he could fulfil what you keep telling us was his sole purpose from the beginning – H. sapiens. THAT is where your hypotheses become irreconcilable.

If God chose to evolve, and He did, and as humans are the goal as I see it, life had to eat during the 3.5+ billion years. Perfectly logical, but unacceptable to you for some reason I cannot see.

dhw: Forget the Bible, then. It is you who insist that he is in full control. His choice of method to do what? If he wanted to gain the satisfaction of creating lots of different ecosystems, your hypothesis makes sense: the pleasure of watching different forms of life evolve. You say he designed each one, and I suggest that he equipped them to do the designing themselves. The end product is the same. But if his sole purpose was to create us, you run into your logical brick wall: why specially create the whale if he could have created us without the whale?

Simply because He obviously didn't want to do it that way . Just accept what history tells us.

dhw: ... Once more: if you really believe that survivability plays no role, please explain why you think your God changed legs to fins, and extracted pre-baleen teeth and then a few million years later inserted baleens for the sake of complexity and not survival.

DAVID: Of course, in creating new ecosystems, the organisms in that system must be capable of survival. God is not inconsistent in his methods.

dhw:We are discussing your insistence that survival plays little or no role in evolution. So did your God perform the above operations for the satisfaction of creating a new toothless whale and a new ecosystem (nothing to do with fulfilling his sole purpose of creating us), or were they designed to enable the pre-whale and pre-baleen whale to survive?

New forms have to be designed to survive, or what is the purpose of these new organisms?

dhw: And please explain the relevance of your statement that “humans survive better than any other animal on earth with the modifications as they came out of the trees.”

DAVID: Answered immediately above.

dhw: Not answered at all. If your God specially designed modifications that enable humans to survive better than any other animal, how can you say survivability played little or no role in the modifications your God specially designed?

Of course new organisms had to designed to survive or evolution stops. Remember I view God as running the show of evolution. You view evolution from a chance natural mechanism, or have God give up some of His controls. Why should He?

DAVID (under “How we became marathoners”): A gene has been found, which allowed us to run down prey. We sweat, they don't. And later: On two feet we obviously needed this ability to run down game.

dhw: But according to you, this evolutionary development enhancing our ability to catch our food has nothing to do with survivability.

God designs us for survivability. If we didn't survive, what is the point of making us? My view is survivability does not drive evolution, God does. You are still pure Darwin, even if you hate my saying so.