dhw:Big brain evolution: comparing chimp and brain organoids (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, March 05, 2019, 10:48 (2088 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I have always agreed that human mental faculties are special (but see below for startling results). And I have indeed offered you “other ways to create a logical framework […] But instead you choose a framework that you cannot explain: one goal, total control, and yet takes 3.5+ billion years specially designing anything but what he wants to design, and only then does he start the itty-bitty special design of big toes, pelvises, mini to maxi brains. Hominin after hominin, human after human, until at last he specially designs H. sapiens.

DAVID: You won't accept my approach that I don't have to explain God's choice of method when no supposition can achieve nothing but discussion with no conclusions. Your logical suggestions run of in many directions and raise issues that will always hang there and just keep hanging.

As you yourself keep repeating, all our hypotheses – including that of God’s existence – are guesses which cannot lead to a provable conclusion. All we can do is test the logic of each guess. If your approach is now that we should not discuss anything that can’t lead to the objective truth, I might as well close down the website. But you are as dedicated as I am to the search for logical explanations, which is why you have written two brilliant books to try and logically prove the existence of your God. You only call off the search for logical explanations when I point out that your fixed belief in your God's purposes and methods has logical flaws in it.

DAVID: Your possible explanations of God's methods are logical and only part of issues in which to be concerned, issues about results of the process. If evolution is, in Darwin terms, unguided, humans are a startling unexpected result. I try to encompass a holistic view of the issue, not just the method but the resultant outcome.

dhw: There is nothing holistic about a process which entails one goal, total control, and a delay of 3.5+ billion years spent specially designing anything but the only thing your God wants to design. Life itself is startling, and if we take bacteria as a beginning, dinosaurs, elephants, whales etc. etc. are startling unexpected results, and I would say the human brain is the most startling result of all – but it is the culmination of thousands of millions of years of startling results, and you yourself have traced the itty-bitty steps by which H. sapiens has evolved from earlier life forms.

DAVID: Why are all the advances startling? Startling results should have startling causes or cause. All of these advances require design and therefore a designer. Why does your thought pattern stop at startling?

I am replying to your statement that “humans are an unexpected startling result”. Why does your thought pattern stop at humans? If all life forms evolved from single cells, don’t you find dinosaurs, elephants and whales startling? If you do, why do you think your God specially designed them if his sole purpose was to specially design startling humans? Your only answer so far has been because he chose to spend 3.5+ billion years designing anything but the only thing he wanted to design, and we shouldn’t ask why.