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

by David Turell , Sunday, March 17, 2019, 18:47 (2076 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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).

God made an obvious choice, since other methods were available. It's your problem, not mine.

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!

dhw: 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.

You have again produced your non sequitur of doubting God's choice after agreeing God had the right to make His own choices. Human brains are the latest, and perhaps last evolutionary creation. It is obviously God's current purpose, now achieved, skipping over a debate about future events. If He chose to use evolution in the beginning, which you agree is reasonable, He must have had human brains in His mind as an eventual goal. Evolution takes lots of time. I've satisfactorily explained the need for food supply which explains the bush of life. You've agreed about the food supply. So I view your comments as totally illogical and ignoring your own agreements.

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.

dhw: 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?

You've forgotten that Neanderthal/sapiens interbreeding has been shown to provide a better immune system for the resultant sapiens now existing. That was partially due to the fact they lived in a harsher environment than the sapiens who came from Africa. The Dinosivans might have provided something else. Note: Friday, February 24, 2017, 22:12. God might have had different groups develop different aspects of DNA in just this way. Not experimenting, purposeful, as usual.