David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 11, 2019, 17:49 (1807 days ago) @ dhw

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

dhw: 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.

You don't understand my concept of God. In charge He had the right to chose to evolve humans over time, because history tells us what He did. I don't have to know why He made that decision. I simply accept what He obviously did. Your bolded statement above is entirely off the point as far as I am concerned. You raised it and it is your problem as you constantly try to humanize God and discern His reasoning, to which we are not privy. Guess all you want, but is still all guesses.

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!!!

dhw: 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”.

I've said God's logic is like ours. It is decisions of purpose that are beyond our knowledge.

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

dhw: 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.

dhw: 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.

dhw: 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.

Your usual mantra. Gould's gaps are not explained and he had to invent the weird idea of punc inc to cover the obvious gaps for which there were not environmental pushes. The human brain growth is a great example. Apes are still in the trees and we are on the ground, and both are doing well. Adler's point. There is no environmental reason for our brains. Adler's other point is that God is a person like no other person. Thus we cannot be compared to Him. Adler's other point is God may not be as personal as religions claim. He thinks those odds are 50/50.