David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 18, 2019, 15:40 (1800 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Evolution is a stepwise process. It had to take the time history shows. Evolution is a journey to a final goal.

dhw: Nobody will disagree that evolution has taken time, but the stepwise process led to a huge variety of non-human species extant and (most tellingly) extinct, and there is every chance that the stepwise process will eventually reverse itself and the planet will finish up with nothing but bacteria. Many religions do believe in a final goal, but for some reason your final goal stops with the arrival of you and me. You are happy to go on and on about God’s purposefulness, but you are not prepared to discuss his purpose for specially designing us. This in itself is odd. And you are still as stuck as ever with the absurdity of an all-powerful, all-knowing God who had only one “final goal” but decided to spend 3.X billion years not designing the only thing he really wanted to design.

God's motives and purposes are all up for discussion, but since He hasn't told us His reasoning, it all will be guess work. We've done that before and covered most of the possibilities. I strongly feel we are the endpoint, since as top predator we control the flow of life on Earth. There are rare minor reversals in evolution when devolution has been noted. Yet the strong flow of evolution is more and more complexity.

dhw: […] when you attempt to “reason from the actual history”, the result is your bolded comment on your own theory, which I had better quote in full: “Nothing illogical required if one does not apply human reasoning to the actual history” and “You try to make God logical to fit your human thinking. It doesn’t work.” No, your attempt to “make God logical to fit your human thinking” certainly doesn’t work. So maybe God thinks differently from the way you try to make him think. Please stop distorting your own words.

DAVID: I'm only trying to rearrange and correct your misinterpretations, all of which I have explained over and over.

dhw: You have tried over and over to ignore or twist the above acknowledgement, frequently telling us that your God’s logic is different from ours, then telling us that he thinks logically as we do, then agreeing that he might well think as we do, but then complaining that we shouldn’t humanize him by assuming he might think as we do. See below.

Again, misrepresentation of my view. God uses logic as we do. But we cannot know for sure His motives and purposes.

dhw: If he exists, I also view him as precisely purposeful. The purpose and method you impose on him are illogical, so maybe one of my different logical alternatives is closer to the truth.

DAVID: Your proposals for God's purposes are all humanized reasons.

dhw: See what I mean?

You constantly humanize God as you try to analyze His thoughts.

Under “biological complexity":

QUOTE: "'The retina of flycatchers, which are sit-and-wait predatory birds, evolved a novel cellular structure in a photoreceptor that may allow them to detect, track and capture fast-moving prey, like insects," he said."

DAVID: Another complex structure requiring design by a designer.

dhw: Or designed by the cell communities of the flycatcher’s immediate ancestors, in the process known as evolution, whereby – according to one theory – the cell communities design changes that will enable them to enhance their chances of survival. Another theory is that such changes take place by sheer chance, and another theory is that the retina of flycatchers was either divinely dabbled or preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago, all because a God had decided not to pursue his final goal of designing H. sapiens, and therefore had to design all kinds of non-human innovations to fill in the 3.X billion years he had decided to wait before pursuing his one and only goal.

Thoughts of a true agnostic.

dhw: Thank you for all the other entries on different subjects, which I feel don’t require comment from me.

You are welcome.