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

by dhw, Monday, March 18, 2019, 10:07 (2075 days ago) @ David Turell

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).

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

You cannot explain why an always-in-control God would choose to spend 3.5+ billion years designing anything but the only thing he wanted to design (the brain of H. sapiens). But you are right: in any discussion, if one interlocutor acknowledges that his belief is inexplicable but refuses to consider other explanations which even he recognizes as being logical, it’s the other guy who has a problem. How can you argue with someone who rejects logic? I wonder how you would respond to an atheist who agreed that your design argument for the existence of God was perfectly logical, but it’s obvious that there is no God.

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DAVID: You have again produced your non sequitur of doubting God's choice after agreeing God had the right to make His own choices.

Of course he had the right. I am doubting your interpretation of his choice – not the choice of evolution, but the choice to spend 3.5+ billion years designing anything but the one thing he wanted to design!

DAVID: 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.

And so once again you ignore the point at issue, which is the illogical COMBINATION of your hypotheses. The one you have left out here is that your God is always in control. What you yourself cannot explain is why a God 1) who is in full control and 2) whose one and only goal is the brain of H. sapiens, 3) specially designed millions of other life forms so that they could eat or not eat one another until he specially designed the only thing he wanted to design. You can make a logical case for either of the first two, but you cannot combine them logically with 3). That is why I have offered you a range of alternatives, all of which you agree are logical.

dhw: 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?

DAVID: You've forgotten that Neanderthal/sapiens interbreeding has been shown to provide a better immune system for the resultant sapiens now existing. […] God might have had different groups develop different aspects of DNA in just this way. Not experimenting, purposeful, as usual.

If your God was in full control and H. sapiens was his one and only goal, why could he not have directly provided H. sapiens with the better immune system? Possible answers: he was not in full control; H. sapiens was not his one and only goal; he deliberately designed different groups in the course of his “experiments in humanity”; he gave free rein to the evolutionary mechanisms he had designed. Or of course your own answer: he chose to do it that way, and you have no idea why.