David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 11, 2019, 10:14 (1807 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: It is your delay, not mine. It was required time.

dhw: Once again you ignore your contradiction of yourself. Please look at what you wrote: it was his decision to delay. That is your statement, not mine!

DAVID: You brought up the problem of delay. I simply answered with the reason.

Of course I brought up the problem. You invented the idea that your God was always in control, had only one purpose, but decided not to start fulfilling it for 3.X billion years. That is the “delay”. And you have no idea why he took this decision. Your “simple” answer was not to the problem of delay but to your God’s decision to design millions of non-human life forms, natural wonders etc.: you said he had to do so in order to keep life going during the inexplicable delay.

dhw: Econiches are necessary for all species. […] You wrote that the "process of producing physical forms should proceed into a specific direction if humans are to be evolved”. It didn't! It went all over the place! So maybe (theistic proposals) humans were not his one and only purpose, or maybe he was experimenting, or maybe humans came late on in his thinking.

DAVID: Of course it went all over the place. Econiches are required at every level of development and all the time until humans arrive. The bold is a very limited version of econiche importance. Your humanizing reappears!!!

As above, you simply ignore the inexplicable delay which you have invented and which made it necessary for your God to “cover” the time by specially designing millions of non-human life forms. My “humanizing” offers logical explanations for your “delay” and fits in with your own comment that your God “very well could think like us”.

Dhw: The fact that you prefer to believe your own explanation does not suddenly make my different versions illogical.

DAVID: They are your illogical objections to my faith in God, reasoning from many years of reading research. My picture of God is not yours in which your thought is He only might exist and be very human in thought. I think we have exhausted this subject.

I have no objections to your faith in God or to your reasons for believing in him. My objections are to the illogicality of your theory of evolution, to which I have offered theistic alternatives which you have always agreed are logical. I have spelled out your theory in your own words, but have also noted the fact that your God “very well could think like us” (which gets rid of your vague “humanizing” objection” to my alternatives), and that your theory is only logical if “we do not apply human reasoning to the actual history”. You persistently ignore your own comments when trying to defend your theory and attack my alternatives.

DAVID’s comment (under “Privileged Planet”): Still more evidence on how this planet was carefully prepared for us. Obviously we were the final goal.

So long as you persist in making such statements, we will not have “exhausted this subject”. If we were the final goal, and your God was always in total control, and you “have no idea” why he decided to spend 3.X billion years designing millions of non-human life forms before starting to design us, there is nothing obvious about your fixed belief. However, your subsequent comments on the subject are:

DAVID: Studies continue to show how this planet prepared for life to start.

That’s more like it! No fancy theories about your God’s one and only “final purpose”, self-imposed delay, necessity to cover the time by designing 3.X billion years’ worth of non-human life forms, econiches etc. Just the start of life…

DAVID: Lots of oxygen allows for evolutionary advances as genomes are changed.

An important contribution to our discussions on evolution: environmental change allows for evolutionary advances. These are not made in anticipation of environmental changes but occur as a response to them.