Natural Wonders & Evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, September 10, 2019, 10:38 (1899 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: We differ widely in view: Any alteration of foot to flipper requires major design changes and from air to water exquisite physiologic changes. These are not adaptations, but major alterations of form and biochemistry.

An alteration is not an innovation. Of course all the changes were adaptations to life in the water, and I keep saying they were major. Call them “exquisite” if you like, but that still doesn’t make them innovations. That is why I say the borderline between adaptation and innovation is not clear, and the mechanism which we know can produce minor alterations MAY (it’s a theory) also have been responsible for the major alterations that lead to speciation. Nobody knows the cause of speciation, and divine dabbling or preprogramming is your own unproven theory.

DAVID: You present a very strange God. It is just your intentional misinterpretation of my repeated statements that humans were His eventual goal.

dhw: You have repeatedly stated that your God’s goal was H. sapiens, and that he decided to take 3.X billion years to start fulfilling that goal, and therefore he had to create all the other non-human life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders in order to cover that time. All summed up by your statement: “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.” Please tell me what I have misinterpreted.

DAVID: How you overemphasize the concept of 'goal', giving my God only one supreme purpose and thereby distorting my theory that He chose to use an evolution method, just as history tells us, as I assume God created our reality.

What have I distorted? If he exists, and common descent is true, then of course he used evolution to produce all species and all realities. That is not the part of your theory that is in dispute! It is you who overemphasize the concept of ‘goal’ by constantly harping on about human specialness as being his one and only purpose! See below.

dhw: […] please explain what you meant by your God wanting/desiring the entire bush of life. You appear at last to be jettisoning your earlier belief that he had to specially design all branches of the bush only in order to provide the food to cover the time he had decided to take in order to specially design the life form which was his “final goal”.

DAVID: Again you purposely skip the point, we are different in kind, not degree. The point is, through evolution we are a giant step no other species exhibits, given above in my comment.

All species are different in kind, and yes we are special and our intelligence is a giant step no other species exhibits. No disagreement there. But from that fact you extrapolated your theory that we were God’s one and only purpose from the beginning, and he decided to wait 3.X billion years before designing us, and he had to design all the other life forms etc. to cover the time. However, at long last, you have conceded that your God may have actually wanted or desired the bush of life, most of which had nothing whatsoever to do with the special design of H. sapiens. This can only mean that he specially designed (your fixed belief) the whole bush, including humans, or he created an autonomous mechanism to design the whole bush, including humans (my alternative theory) in order to satisfy his wants or desires. Of course you don’t want to discuss what those wants or desires might be, though you did once suggest that your God might enjoy his work as a painter enjoys his paintings. I’d go along with that. We have (almost) made great progress!