Unanswered questions (General)

by dhw, Thursday, August 29, 2019, 10:31 (1911 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: […] if his one and only goal was to “evolve” H. sapiens, it makes no sense at all to have him decide NOT to begin “evolving” H. sapiens, but instead to evolve billions of non-human life forms extant and extinct to keep life going until he “evolved” the only thing he wanted to “evolve”. (NB for you “evolve” = individually design).

DAVID: Yes, for me God designed all of evolution. Your version of God wants to jump right to humans. But that is not the history of the appearance of humans.

It certainly isn’t. And so if your God really did specially design every single life form, lifestyle and natural wonder, doesn’t that suggest to you that he did not start out with the one and only purpose of specially designing H. sapiens?

DAVID: How can I know why God makes the choices He does make?

dhw: Wrong question. How can you know God’s choices? It is you who insist that he CHOSE or “decided” to take 3.X billion years before starting the process of designing the only thing he wanted to design.

DAVID: My version of God chose to evolve humans over time as the history shows. Your impatient God wants to jump right to making humans. The problem between us is my version of God is not your version of God, and we will never meet in the middle.

Your version of God chose to specially design every single life form etc. although he only wanted to design one. And your only response to this incongruity, as below, is that God’s logic is different from ours.

DAVID: I'll stick with Adler and his point that we cannot know God's logic. My theory is nonsense only for the God you invent. Let's finally stop.

I wish we could, but in post after post you attempt to impose the same illogical theory on the history of life, which obliges me to respond in order to restore the balance. Two of the latest examples:

Under “balance of nature”:
dhw: I feel obliged to point out that the vastness of this unseen world and the variety of econiches that come and go are irrelevant to David’s theory that his God designed them all to cover the time he had decided to take before designing the only thing he wanted to design: H. sapiens.

DAVID: Total distortion as usual in the bolded section. God knew, full well, that all of evolution had to be designed before He got to designing humans and He WANTED to design it all.

No distortion. You wrote: “He knew those designs were required interim goals to establish the necessary food supply to cover the time He knew he had decided to take.”

According to you, then, it was his decision to take 3.X billion years before starting to fulfil his one and only purpose, which was to design H. sapiens (though even then he designed lots of hominins and homos before designing the only one he wanted to design – see below). He therefore had to design the rest of the bush to cover the time he had decided to take.

Under “human evolution”:
QUOTES: "In the popular imagination, human evolution proceeds through a series of species, each one being a more evolved version of the last.

“'Most of the time, that’s not really the case,” says Spoor.
"Species often represent separate branches on a tree, with the direct ancestors – the branchpoints – leaving no trace. “You hardly ever find the real ancestor of something else,” says Spoor.

DAVID: It looks like we came from a bush of pre-hominins and hominins. To me it looks as if God was willing to take lots of time to finally evolve humans, just as these findings show.

If your always-in-control God’s one and only purpose was to design H. sapiens, why in heaven’s name would he specially design a whole bush of homos and hominins before he specially designed the only species he wanted to design? To me it looks as if either your God was experimenting, didn’t quite know what he wanted, knew what he wanted but couldn’t quite work out how to get it, or all these different species were the result of different cell communities doing their own designing, which resulted in a higgledy-piggledy bush of species analogous to the higgledy-piggledy bush of evolution as a whole. You have repeatedly acknowledged that these are logical alternative explanations of the history, but you happen to know that your God is always in total control, has no human attributes, and above all doesn’t think or work in ways that conform to human logic. How do you know this?

Perhaps we could end this discussion if you would stop imagining that every new discovery somehow confirms your illogical theory, but it is your amazing capacity for keeping abreast of all the discoveries that keeps this website going, and of course you must be free to comment on them. But I must also be free to comment on your comments!