Divine purposes and methods (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, January 06, 2019, 10:50 (2146 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: A concept of God who decides His actions in required. Mine is not yours.

dhw: And yours includes the fact that you don’t understand it yourself. Why do you think a God who decides to experiment has not decided to experiment?

DAVID: I'm not supposed to understand it from God's viewpoint. I simply accept what He did and explain the need for food.

dhw: And what was the purpose of supplying food for specially designed organisms which had nothing to do with the only organism he wanted to design which – according to you –was H. sapiens?

DAVID: You keep, perhaps purposely, ignoring the fact that God chose to evolve humans over lots of time.

It is you who insist that this was God’s choice! It is not a fact that God said to himself (I am simply summarizing your hypothesis): “My only purpose is to specially design humans, and I choose to take 3.5+ billion years to do it, and so I will specially design millions of other life forms to eat each other until the time has passed.” Even you can’t understand such thinking, as you admit:
DAVID: I can't explain God's reasoning, so why shouldn't I simply accept history as I see it …?

Because it doesn’t make sense even to you!

dhw: What was the point of specially designing 3.5+ billion years’ worth of food if his only purpose was to specially design H. sapiens? That is the point you cannot answer, but, as I wrote yesterday: you agree that this gap is closed if he had to experiment in order to achieve his purpose (i.e. didn’t know how to do it) or if humans came as a late afterthought as he experimented to see what he could come up with through all these different life forms). Why do you ignore these perfectly logical answers to the question?

DAVID: Those are logical human suppositions, but God is not human and His reasons are not revealed to us. So you can suppose about Him all you want.

Yes, we can only speculate about his reasons. But wouldn’t you agree that a logical explanation has a better chance of being right than an illogical one?

DAVID: I accept that He chose to evolve us and the massive diversity of life supplies food from the various ecosystems to supply ongoing evolution until humans arrived in sapiens form. I doubt major evolution will ever occur again.

You accept your own interpretation of why he did what he did, even though you can’t explain your own reasoning (which you call “God’s reasoning”).

DAVID: You invent too much about God. He has offered no explanations. Keep it simple: God chose to evolve us. Obvious, since we are the current and probably the last endpoint of evolution. Our consciousness is not a necessary event from the standpoint of improvements for survival. Survival is no issue if we accept bacterial persistence. Increasing complexity of life is obvious at each new stage of evolution, with no need for that advancement for survival.

If God exists, he chose to evolve the whole bush of life, including us. Survival was no issue until the arrival of multicellularity, and then it is clear that innovation after innovation was geared to improving chances of survival (although sometimes – as in the case of pre-baleen whale teeth, or the sticklebacks, certain complexities were discarded in order to improve survivability). This also applied to humans, since according to you their hairlessness and bipedalism improved their chances of hunting prey and escaping from predators, and the various modifications enabled them to “survive better than any other animal on earth”.

DAVID: So if complexity appears to be driven by a 'force' and we sapiens finally are here, the only explanation needed for the diversity of life is the food supply energy for evolution to occur over 3.8 billion years. And you've agreed about the need for the food! Keep the reasoning simple as I just did. God chose to evolve life. Accept it.

If God exists, then of course he chose to evolve life. But I’m afraid that does not provide one iota of logic for your “simple reasoning” that God wanted to design us, and chose to design millions of other life forms to eat each other so that it would take him 3.5+ billion years to do the one thing he wanted to do.