Unanswered questions (General)

by David Turell , Sunday, May 26, 2019, 16:45 (2006 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: So do you still think your God designed every single organismal change before it was required, and if so do you think he preprogrammed or dabbled every environmental change, both global and local?

DAVID: I am convinced God directed the evolution of life as history tells us. He certainly evolved the development of the Earth so it could support life. As for local environment, the various massive ice ages which did not deter hominin development suggest He did not control local environment.

dhw: Interesting, since many of evolution’s innovations – including various pre-human changes - may well have sprung from local environments. So maybe your God designed a mechanism that would respond to absolutely any environmental change, and he left it to chance (uncontrolled local environments) to determine how organisms used that mechanism. And yet you claim that he specially designed every undabbled innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in advance, which is pretty weird if he didn’t know what environments each “pre-species” would have to deal with.

Not weird. Have you forgotten the hominins had a developing brain that could think and reason in differing climates?

dhw: Bearing in mind that your concept of evolution is that your always-in-control God SPECIALLY DESIGNED every single life form, lifestyle and natural wonder in history, please explain why it was necessary for him to specially design the whale’s flipper, the cuttlefish’s camouflage, the monarch’s migration pattern and the weaverbird’s nest so that they could all eat or not eat one another until he SPECIALLY DESIGNED all the special features of all the different hominins, hominids and homos leading to sapiens.

DAVID: Thoroughly explained that since life requires a constant ingestion of energy, the econiches, of which you have seen many examples, are required and the contain many of the marvelous features of life you list above.

dhw: Yes indeed – ALL life requires energy, and that has nothing to do with your fixed belief that your God’s only purpose was to create H. sapiens. So once more: why did he bother to create all the extinct econiches containing all the extinct non-human life forms etc. etc.?

Your same old mantra. If God chose to evolve humans, as I believe, history tells us what He did.

dhw: In the past you have acknowledged that you have “no idea”. Apparently you now have a logical explanation. If you haven’t, then please acknowledge that this combination of hypotheses is illogical and we can move on.

DAVID: My 'no idea' quote meaning is unchanged. I have no idea why God chose to evolve life to reach human creation. As usual you have picked it out of context. I view what I have presented as totally logical. For example, the flipper allowed land-based mammals to enter an aquatic environment. The monarch's migration is a simple response to summer/winter.

dhw: Exactly. Evolutionary change is geared to environmental change, as I have been saying all along. And you have no idea why your God chose to evolve (= specially design) not “life” itself but every single non-human life form etc….see below.

DAVID: But they have other roles:
https://duckduckgo.com/l/?kh=-1&uddg=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gardenguides.com%2F113032-fl...
Butterflies, with their strikingly colored, delicate wings, aren’t just good lookers. They serve an important purpose for many flowering plants they rely on for food, shelter and procreating etc. etc.

dhw: As usual, you fasten onto one aspect of your combination of hypotheses, and ignore the combination that is the problem. Here you are repeating the fact that all econiches are delicately balanced. (And when the balance is disturbed the econiche may disappear.)

But there are always econiches operating to fill the energy needs

dhw: So now please explain at last why your God specially designed every undabbled life form, lifestyle, natural wonder and delicately balanced econiche in life’s history when the only thing he wanted to specially design was H. sapiens.

Your same old mantra. If God chose to evolve humans, as I believe, history tells us what He did. Same old illogical objection to my acceptance of how God chose to create. Same old implication: why not direct creation? Because we know evolution occurred.