Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Monday, May 27, 2019, 09:23 (2005 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

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

That is the whole point about speciation. Have you forgotten that hominins and humans are not the only species to have existed on earth? I am proposing that instead of every undabbled response to every unpredictable, random change in the environment being preprogrammed, ALL organisms were equipped with a form of thinking, reasoning intelligence to enable them to cope with or exploit the changes (although eventually the vast majority of them could not think or reason intelligently enough to survive).

DAVID: […] 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.?

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

History tells those of us who believe in evolution that if God exists he chose to evolve ALL forms of life. It does not tell us that he specially designed (= preprogrammed or dabbled) every form of life for the sole purpose of enabling them to eat or not eat one another until he specially designed the only thing he wanted to design: H. sapiens.

DAVID: I have no idea why God chose to evolve life to reach human creation. […] 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.

DAVID: […] 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.)

DAVID: But there are always econiches operating to fill the energy needs.

Yes, they come and go, and species come and go accordingly, and this fact has absolutely nothing to do with your contention, as above, that every single econiche was specially designed so that organisms could or could not eat one another until your God specially designed the only thing he wanted to design: H. sapiens.