David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, December 26, 2019, 08:20 (1792 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I believe God chose to evolve us. Since God is in charge history tells us what He did.

dhw: And history tells us that if your God exists, for 3.X billion years he “chose to evolve” a vast bush of non-human life forms, econiches etc., as described earlier. History does not tell us that this whole bush was specially designed as an “interim goal” to keep life going because your God had decided not to pursue his one and only goal (H. sapiens) for 3.X billion years.

DAVID: Ignoring as usual the obvious need for a balance of nature supplying food. Your reasoning always stops in the middle of the full thought.

The balance of nature supplying food applies to every econiche and every species in life’s history and has nothing whatsoever to do with your insistence that your God specially designed all of them as “interim goals” to keep life going for 3.X billion years before he embarked on designing the econiches and species that would lead to his one and only goal, H. sapiens. Your reasoning always focuses on one aspect of your theory and leaves out all those parts that render it illogical.

dhw: We cannot even "know" if God exists. If he does, of course we cannot "know" his purpose, let alone the reason for his purpose, but you keep insisting that you do know it, and any logical alternative to your own illogical theory is to be discounted because it humanizes God although God “very well could think like us.”

DAVID: Adler's theology cannot be ignored. God uses logic as we do. Can all you do is quote out of context?

I have never ignored Adler’s argument that H. sapiens is evidence of God’s existence. You have admitted that he has nothing to say about the rest of your theory. “God uses logic as we do” is a statement that omits the fact that you cannot understand why he decided to spend 3.X billion years not designing the only thing he wanted to design. Your statement that this is not illogical “if one does not apply human reasoning to the actual history” is not taken out of context. What else could it possibly refer to? And what can possibly be out of context with the plain statement that your God might think like us?

dhw: […] after admitting it is not logical, you now switch to saying that we can’t know his reasoning and so we should accept your illogical interpretation of it without considering any logical alternative.

DAVID: You do not accept the God I am describing. My God is fully purposeful and knows exactly what He is doing as shown in the history He created. Your mamby-pamby god has as goal and doesn't know how to get to it, so he is humanly illogical, and purposely not capitalized.

Over and over again I have agreed that if God exists, he must be fully purposeful and knows exactly what he is doing. Our dispute is over the purpose and what he did, and I have offered you different alternatives, depending on what purpose one attributes to him. If that purpose really was confined to the production of H. sapiens - but there are other purposes that will explain the bush of pre-human life - then a logical explanation of that bush would be (a) that he was experimenting to get it and knew that he was experimenting to get it. There is nothing namby-pamby or humanly illogical about a creative mind working out scientifically how to create something that never existed before. Alternatively, (b) there is nothing namby-pamby or illogical about a creative mind setting certain processes in motion to see what they will produce (and perhaps even intervening as new ideas arise out of the results).

DAVID: Which Edicaran cell committees designed the Cambrian creatures?

dhw: Since you believe in common descent, tell us which Edicaran cell communities your God preprogrammed or dabbled with in order to produce the Cambrian innovations. You told us on the Shapiro thread that these could only be stem cells or germ cells. I’m not going to argue.

DAVID: Remember, they are your cell committees. God has no need for them. God can certainly modify the DNA in germ cells!

Of course he can. You asked me which cells would have designed the Cambrian creatures, and I have given you the answer you gave me: if your God gave cells the autonomous intelligence to design the Cambrian creatures, they would be the same cells you believe your God preprogrammed or dabbled in order to design them.