David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 26, 2019, 16:17 (1792 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

And you always accept a God in charge, but then dispute the reasons why He did it.

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.

dhw: 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.

The bolds in your statement above are obviously contradictory: powerful God produced a fine-tuned universe which evolved beautifully, an Earth which evolved to the point that He could create life and then you WANT Him to suddenly experiment! Talk of totally illogical.

dhw: 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).

Still describing a humanistic God who isn't sure how or what to produce by some mechanism.

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!

dhw: 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.

The Cambrian required a powerful clear-thinking designing mind, not cell committees. It is easier to do the design than teach the cells how to design.