Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Tuesday, August 06, 2019, 13:21 (1934 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: What you “totally miss here” is that the "known" history of evolution tells us that ALL forms of life evolved from bacteria. There is no consensus even among theists that God’s one and only reason for creating life was to evolve (which to you means “specially design”) H. sapiens by starting with bacteria! The theistic version of history can only tell us what he did, not what he intended: that is your personal interpretation of the history and of his mind.

DAVID: I'm simply following Adler's point. Our specialness as a result of evolution can be taken as a proof God exists. This is what you do not accept.

I accept our specialness, and I accept the design argument as a powerful one for the existence of God. Yet again: I do not accept that your God specially designed every life form in evolution’s history, or that he did so for the one and only purpose of producing H. sapiens.

DAVID: Evolution required what God produced in order to reach complex humans from bacteria. Simply evolving from simple to very complex.

According to you, evolution means that your God designed every life form, and so you are merely repeating that your God “had to” design every life form extant and extinct in order to design the only thing he wanted to design, which was H. sapiens. And you have “no idea” why.

DAVID: I follow ID thought. All of those evolutionary steps required a designing mind. My take is an offshoot of theirs.

Yet again, I accept the logic of the design argument. Your “take” is the issue which you yourself find inexplicable.

dhw: I note, however, that once more you fall back on “primary purpose”. Then please tell us his other purposes, as this might open the door to a more logical view of the history. I don’t know why you keep falling back on Adler – it is your reasoning I do not accept.

DAVID: You really don't know Adler and his reasoning. I have 'no idea' about why God chose evolution because I can't know his reasons. My concept is an amalgam of Adler and ID.

You refuse to answer my question about other purposes, you can’t find any reasonable explanation for the “amalgam”, you accept the logic of the theistic alternatives I keep offering you, and your only argument now seems to be that you’ve read Adler and I haven’t. But it seems that neither Adler nor ID offers one iota of support for your fixed and inexplicable belief that your God’s one and only purpose was to design H. sapiens and therefore he “had to” design the whale’s flipper and the weaverbird’s nest.