Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Friday, May 31, 2019, 10:05 (2004 days ago) @ David Turell

I have again transferred material to this thread, where it is more appropriate.

DAVID (transferred from “cellular intelligence”): I agree that God might have designed a semi-autonomous design mechanism, but you view God as wishy-washy in control of evolution, and i view Him in firm control.

dhw: Semi-autonomous is meaningless.

DAVID: Semi-autonomous applies only to the mechanism you imagine God might have given to organisms so they can speciate.

Since you insist that your God either preprogrammed or personally dabbled every innovation, please specify precisely what half of the process of speciation is autonomous.

dhw: Either he did or he didn’t preprogramme or dabble every design. There is nothing “wishy-washy” about a God who decides to create an autonomous mechanism that takes its own decisions – or are you now telling us that your God is wishy-washy because he gave humans free will?

DAVID: […]I view God as maintaining tight control of evolution. You, obviously, do not.

Why is it “wishy-washy” for your God deliberately to invent mechanisms which control themselves?

dhw: Your “firm control” contradicts your belief that the only thing he wanted to design was H. sapiens, but for some unknown reason he proceeded to design 3.5+ billion years’ worth of non-human life forms. Furthermore, you have recently decided that he did NOT control local environmental changes, which means he did not control the very thing which his innovations were designed in advance to cope with! A weird kind of "firm control".

DAVID: You make a constant note that species come and go. Succumbing to environmental changes is part of the pattern of evolution.

Of course it is, and it makes nonsense of the claim that your in-control God specially designed all the different species extant and extinct if he only wanted to design one species, namely H. sapiens. And please tell us how he remains in “firm control” if he does not “control the very thing which his innovations were designed in advance to cope with” – namely changing environmental conditions. Does he keep permanent watch on a crystal ball?

DAVID: […] God does not offer any plan to maintain all species forever, which is the implication!

That is not the implication at all! If God exists, it is as clear as it could possibly be that he did not want species to last for ever, but you claim that he specially designed all of them although the only one he wanted to design was H. sapiens! Yet again: Why did he specially design billions of life forms etc. if he only wanted to design H. sapiens? You simply refuse to acknowledge that it is the combination of your different hypotheses that renders them incongruous.