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

by dhw, Sunday, March 17, 2019, 14:51 (2076 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You have said your hypothesis doesn’t fit my human logic. You have also said you have no idea why your always-in-full-control God would have chosen to spend billions of years specially designing millions of life forms to eat or not eat one another until he specifically designed the only thing he wanted to design. The fact that no hypothesis is provable is not the point. If you can’t find a logical explanation, may I suggest that your hypothesis doesn’t fit your human logic either?

DAVID: Your insistence on a 'logical' explanation cannot affect my position, since I have no way of knowing why He made choice to evolve life to this point. Logic is accepting God's choice.

What you are now saying is that it is logical to accept your personal INTERPRETATION of God’s choice, even though you find your interpretation inexplicable (which can only be because it is illogical).

DAVID: Humans are currently the most complex of all created. It is easy to read what has been created as God's purpose. Otherwise why create any specific item?

dhw: Your question is right to the point. According to you, he specially created millions and millions of specific items, so if the human brain was his only purpose, why specially create specific items such as dinosaurs, whale flippers, cuttlefish camouflage and weaverbirds’ nests?

DAVID: To repeat: a bush of life creates the ecosystems that provide food for all, so evolution can take the time it needs.

I can certainly accept the obvious fact that evolution can only continue if there is food to enable some of its products to survive. In your hypothesis, though, it’s not evolution but your always-in-control God who “takes the time he needs” to fulfil his one and only purpose (the brain of H. sapiens). This is the illogicality which you continue to acknowledge and then to gloss over (as you do below in your “Neanderthal” comment).

DAVID: You cannot reconcile why God-in-charge chose to wait to evolve the most complex item of all, our brain. I don't have to try to reconcile it. God demonstrates His pattern of development. God started the universe with the Big Bang and it evolved over time. Our Milky Way is about 3.5 byo, about 0.3 billion years after the BB. Our sun is about 5 byo, the Earth is about 4.5 byo. The Earth then evolved enough for the start of life to appear at 3.5+ byo. As I've pointed out in the past, God obviously appears to prefer evolving His purposes. That is my accepted historical evidence. You surely can understand this approach to the issue. My theories don't just pop up out of thin air!

Since you and I both believe in evolution, and if God exists, then all the above is true, and God must have used evolution to fulfil his purpose. But as usual you have completely ignored the point at issue between us: if he is in full control, and his one and only purpose was to produce us, you cannot explain why he chose to specially design millions and millions of other life forms, econiches, lifestyles and natural wonders until 300,000 years ago, when he specially designed us. So do please stop pretending that your potted history of the universe supports your anthropocentric interpretation of your God’s purpose and method. It doesn’t. (See also under “Anthropic Principle”).

Under “How sapiens were Neanderthals: Very”

QUOTE: Far from some primitive offshoot, Neanderthals should be more accurately understood as another of nature’s experiments in humanity."

DAVID: this article shows H. sapiens chauvinism clouded our proper and present view of Neanderthals. Not much different than early sapiens.

I like your phrase “H. sapiens chauvinism”, bearing in mind your insistence that the brain of H. sapiens was your God’s one and only purpose, and I wonder why you have ignored the concept of “nature’s experiments in humanity”. According to you, it was God who specially designed all the variations. Why do you think he specially designed Neanderthal when all he wanted was H. sapiens? Could he have been experimenting, then, as opposed to being in full control, or could he even have left all the experimentation to the intelligent mechanisms he had designed so that they could do their own designing?