Unanswered questions (General)

by David Turell , Sunday, June 02, 2019, 18:10 (1999 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I use semi-autonomous in the sense that it is totally controlled by guidelines, when an organism initiates the process.

dhw: […] please tell us which half of the process is autonomous.

DAVID: 'Semi-" means the organism has some options: it can initiate the process of a new form, but it must follow design requirements. I'm trying to interpret your IM theories in terms of the God I envision.

dhw: How does it autonomously initiate the process of a new form if the new form has already been preprogrammed or if God pops in to do a dabble? What are “design requirements”? If an organism is to switch from land to water, of course it must follow the requirements of life in the water – but again, according to you the design is preprogrammed or dabbled. Your attempt to interpret my autonomous IM theory entails removing all autonomy.

I know you want a free-wheeling IM. The only autonomy I accept in our theorizing about the possibility of an IM is the organisms can initiate the process.

dhw: According to you, evolve = specially design, and neither you nor I can understand why if he ONLY wanted to specially design humans, he specially designed millions of non-human life forms, econiches, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct. You can’t explain this incongruity, so maybe he did not ONLY want to design humans, or he did not specially design all the millions of life forms etc. Please stop isolating your hypotheses when you know it is their COMBINATION that is incongruous.

DAVID: I would love to meet your incongruity. It is entirely invisible to me. How do we get from the first life to humans? By evolution of forms though speciation, which I claim is the result of God's actions. God created all of evolution finally reaching humans. The thought comes from our knowledge of how we arrived. Again, your confused thinking seems to need a God who directly creates humans and also evolves the rest of the bush of life as after thoughts.

dhw: It is you who claim that he directly created both humans AND the rest of the bush of life, because according to you he specially designed every innovation (including each step towards H. sapiens), econiche, lifestyle and natural wonder! I have never suggested that the rest of the bush of life is an afterthought. In order to remove your incongruities, I have proposed one hypothesis in which he specially created every aspect of the bush of life because that was what he wanted, and humans were an afterthought (thus explaining why he specially designed them after specially designing everything else).'

Our disagreement is then God's purpose. we've discussed this before. My God fully knows from the beginning what He wants to achieve, but his chosen method is to evolve everything, every step along the way.

DAVID: His control of evolution had a direction and a purpose at the moment He produced first life.

dhw: If he exists, I would not question that assumption. I only question your blinkered view that he specially created every life form etc., although his one and only purpose was to produce H. sapiens, whom he also specially created late on in the process.

Again, your view of God is someone who bumbles along. God evolves his purposes. For me the evidence is clear.