David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, December 13, 2019, 12:59 (1805 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Of course your God had the right to do whatever he wanted. But what on earth is wrong with trying to understand why he might have acted the way he did? Why are you allowed to guess that your God is a control freak who only had one purpose right from the start but DECIDED not to fulfil it for 3.X billion years, and any other guess is to be dismissed because it is only a guess? Maybe he DECIDED to produce the higgledy-piggledy bush, and only DECIDED later to produce humans.

DAVID: The answer as always is the same: the very unusual result of humans with our level of consciousness makes us so different we are obviously God's primary goal (Adler's precisely logical book). Don't ask about other goals, as you have before as a debating technique. All His goals were stepwise from bacteria to humans with divine purpose. You still can't seem to approach my concept of God as you constantly humanize Him.

It’s not a “debating technique” but an important question in the light of your changing terminology (from only goal to primary goal). Why would God preprogramme or dabble umpteen whale changes if his one and only purpose was to design H. sapiens? Why should the whale not have been a purpose in itself? Why should humans not have come as a late idea in his purposeful thinking? Or why shouldn’t the whole of life’s higgledy-piggledy bush have been one vast experiment – with the purpose of seeing what will happen if…? Please stop your “humanizing” objection, since you have agreed that your God “very well could think like us”.

DAVID: God thinks logically as we do. You will never accept that God had the right to choose to evolve humans from bacteria over time, although you admit a God in change can do what He wants. Talk about inexplicable logic!

Of course he has the right to choose whatever he wants. That does not mean you have the right to limit his choice to evolving humans when history shows that evolution resulted in vast numbers of non-human life forms long before humans came on the scene! If he thinks logically as we do, then maybe one of the above alternatives is correct.

Dhw: My point was that if “lots of oxygen allows for evolutionary advances as genomes are changed”, this suggests that evolutionary advances are made IN RESPONSE to environmental change, whereas you have always insisted that your God preprogrammed or dabbled these advances IN ANTICIPATION of environmental change.

DAVID: We can both agree more oxygen allows more complex organisms to appear, not why they appear. Mammals went swimming and eventually became fish-like, against call odds, like human appearance is against all odds. Evolution is obviously passive if it only responds to environment. You fail to see Adler's and my view that evolution is driven/pushed by God. A vast gulf in philosophic thought.

All multicellular species are “against all odds” since single-cell species have been so successful. Thank you for acknowledging that mammals went swimming and eventually became fish-like – a welcome change from your God dabbling flippers before pre-whales entered the water. Evolution (i.e. organisms evolving into new species) is not “obviously passive”. If it were, most organisms would die if there was environmental change. History shows that some die, some adapt, and some innovate. Adaptation and innovation are not “passive”.
I know you think your God is busy dabbling whatever he hasn’t preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago. You “fail to see” that this creates a logical non sequitur if you also insist that he is always in charge and only had one goal. Once again: I propose – theistic version of the cellular intelligence theory - that if your God exists, he allowed organisms (cell communities) to produce their own variations (you sort of agree) and innovations (you disagree). Unlike your theory, this one does not require us to refrain from applying “human reasoning to the actual history”. Perhaps you now wish you hadn’t said so, but it was an important acknowledgement and confirmation of your confession that you “had no idea” why your God would have chosen the evolutionary method you impose on him.