David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, December 22, 2019, 11:40 (1796 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I view your proposals as inventing a humanized God. Your take on God is wildly different than mine. You view my view as illogical. I view your views as logical humanized versions of God.

dhw: Thank you for agreeing yet again that my alternatives are logical, and for the earlier observation that your God “very well could think like us.” I could hardly wish for a clearer nod of recognition, except that you keep on trying to discredit your own judgement.

DAVID: They are logical for a humanized God, no more. My judgement is quite clear and unchanged.

They are logical for a God who “very well could think like us”. That does not make him human, but simply denotes the possibility of shared characteristics between creator and what he created. I know your judgement is unchanged. I don’t know how you can call it clear when you tell us that God’s logic is different from ours and we shouldn’t try to understand it.

DAVID: Same distorted tired mantra. I do not try to understand God's reason for his purposes. That is the history to which I refer, and you know it. The actual history is evidence of God's work, not the 'why' of it. Your 'why's' are humanizing all the time, and just guesses.

Guessed-at “reason for purposes” is not actual history! The actual history is the bush of life, "and you know it". Your guessed-at “reason for purposes” is that your all-powerful, all-knowing God specially designed the whole bush in order to provide food to keep life going for 3.X billion years until he could start to fulfil his one and only purpose of designing H. sapiens, as confirmed below.

DAVID: God in running evolution preferred branches of development, not single twigs. History declares that fact.

dhw: Of course it does. And that is why your theory cannot be logically applied to the actual history. As you have said yourself, the “process of producing physical forms should proceed into a specific direction if humans are to be evolved”. It didn’t, and that is what makes your theory so illogical.

DAVID: It did produce us, but I'm sure you know evolutionary history tells us a huge bush was produced, and it is required to provide the balance of nature that feeds all. If God went directly from bacteria to us, what would we eat?

Your question refers to the period beginning 0.X billion years ago, when your God apparently began to design all the different ancestors of H. sapiens, with all the itty-bitty innovations, as below. That does not explain why he decided to spend 3.X billion years NOT designing the only thing he wanted to design.

DAVID: But it did have exact directionality to H. sapiens when the time came 300,000 year ago. Upright beings go back more than 2-3 million years with a steady progression of more advanced forms.

dhw: But according to you, your God’s one and only purpose was to produce H. sapiens, so yet again: 1) why did he decide to wait 3.X billion years before embarking on the “evolution” of H. sapiens, thereby having to design billions of other non-human life forms etc. as bolded above, and 2) why did he specially design all these itty-bitty “advances” when over and over again you tell us that evolution is the history of new species produced by jumps and not by itty-bitty “advances”? Your only answer is that this is what happened and therefore God planned it or dabbled it to happen like this. You won’t even consider the possibility that your own human reading of his mind might be wrong, illogical though it is. Maybe he was experimenting; maybe humans were a latecomer in his thinking; or maybe – to use your own intriguing expression – this was a “natural living development”, i.e. each change came about as the intelligent response of intelligent cell communities (perhaps designed by your God) to new conditions and demands or opportunities. Now there’s a thought!

DAVID: Your weirdly strange thinking continues. I've given you reasons for all of your 'problem' objections. The bold above brings up Darwin, not my theory which is formed from Gould's gaps among many other considerations. My quote above says 'steady progression'.

I merely took the expression you used as follows: “…rather than directly implanting those beneficial attributes, he created mechanisms within the various hominin/homo groups to allow natural living development.” I like it. It sounds just like the mechanism of intelligent cell communities naturally making adjustments as and when natural environmental changes required or allowed such adjustments.

DAVID: You think you have a logical answer by telling us simple cells can design, when you accept the issue of design doesn't allow you to be an atheist. The whole thing is your dilemma, not mine. The picket fence is your uncomfortable problem. I'm quite comfortable in my position with the ID folks.

The picket fence concerns the existence of God, and the ID argument is perfectly logical. This is a totally different issue from that of your theistic theory of evolution, which I keep summarizing and which you acknowledge to be incomprehensible to human logic. Please stop conflating the issue of God’s existence with your theory of God’s evolutionary purpose and method.