Unanswered questions (General)

by David Turell , Tuesday, April 23, 2019, 17:32 (2039 days ago) @ dhw
edited by David Turell, Tuesday, April 23, 2019, 17:43

DAVID: Your demand that I explain God's choice to use evolution of life as a means of creating humans makes no sense, yet you persist in reverting to it. I don't have to explain it if I simply accept it as the way He did it. I see you as having the problem.

dhw: If God exists, he used evolution to create EVERY form of life. You are only prepared to accept your preprogramming/dabbling method (even though it is not a belief), which means he specially designed every life form, including humans. You categorically reject random mutations and cellular intelligence as alternative methods. And so it does not make sense that your God specially preprogrammed all the non-human life forms to keep eating or not eating one another even though – in your hypothesis – he was perfectly capable of specially designing the only thing he wanted to design.

Of course I reject random mutations. That issue is dead. As for cellular intelligence,
I agree they appear to act intelligently. Appearance leads you to hope cells are intelligent, which is a way of reducing God's powers of total control. Yet you keep accepting God has the right to choose His method of creation, which history tells us is by evolving life from bacteria to the present forms. Your statement above is just the opposite, and insists God should have jumped in and used the Bible's six-day direct production of humans and all the rest now extant. That puts your feet on both sides of your picket fence.

And under “Big brain evolution”, from which this thread seems to have taken over:

DAVID: I accept God and use history to tell me how He chose to do things. Your problem with faith is obvious.

dhw: I have no problem with your “accepting” God’s existence. My problem is with your refusal to face the fact that if you have no idea why he would choose the method you attribute to him (preprogramming or dabbling the whole of evolution, though even you do not find it convincing enough to believe) in order to achieve the purpose you attribute to him (producing H. sapiens), there may be a flaw in your interpretation of history.

Your thinking is really diffuse. So I'll repeat my positions: God is purposeful and has goals as He creates. He creates by evolving, first the universe from the Big Bang, then the Earth, a very special planet, which can support life, then evolved life from its first beginnings to finally produce humans. That is the exact pattern of our history. With the assumption that God is in charge, it all fits together.

[…]

DAVID: All of this supports my concept of an early controlling program genetically controlling development with underlying patterns to be followed.

dhw: It supports the concept of genetically controlled development harnessed to environmental conditions, and obviously common descent is sure to follow patterns laid down by earlier forms that evolve into new forms. It offers no support whatsoever to the concept of a divine 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for every single bacterial action, evolutionary innovation, econiche, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life past, present and future.

DAVID: I was referring specifically to genetic patterns for form development, not every action in responding to daily activities.

dhw: That was a reference to your hypothesis that every single bacterial adaptation is automatic – i.e., the result of the same process of divine preprogramming or dabbling you invoke (but do not believe in) as your counter to cellular intelligence.

My reference is to the concept of convergence, the fact that the same thing develops over and over in evolution in many, many very different species, unrelated by the pattern of branching in the common descent from an original organism