David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, February 10, 2020, 17:11 (1746 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: He didn't just 'fill time': He evolved us with a huge bush of life to provide the necessary econiches for the energy life needs to control the time it took for evolution to create us. (dhw's bold)

dhw: You have stated that he is always in full control and can achieve what he wants any way he wants. His so-called choice to create 3.X billion years’ worth of non-human species and econiches etc. is inexplicable (glossed over with “for his own reasons”) and according to you it was not evolution that created us but your in-charge God, and what do you mean by “the energy life needs to control the time it took”?

DAVID: Yes, God ran evolution to produce us. Have you forgotten life has to eat?

Of course living organisms have to eat. How does that come to mean that every single organism that ever lived was specially designed to keep eating (or dying) until your God designed us, his one and only purpose?

dhw: I thought it was your God who was in control, not life, and it’s the time your God decided to take to create us, not the time evolution took…The only distortion here is yours.

DAVID: Boy, you can twist!!! God obviously knew His evolution of us would take time.

That is not what you wrote!(Now bolded.) Evolution of anything has to take time, since evolution is an on-going process! I’m simply pointing out that according to you it is not life that controls the time and it is not evolution that created us, but your God decided to take 3.X billion years before he himself started to create us. You admit you have no idea why, and so I have offered you perfectly logical alternatives.

DAVID: Your bold above questions why He made that choice…

dhw: It does not question why He made that choice – it questions WHETHER he made that choice, because that choice defies all human logic.[…].

DAVID: It only defies human logic because you imagine God as having your human thoughts.

I imagine God acting logically, and see no reason to assume that a God who “very well could think like us” has to act in a manner which defies all human logic.

dhw: My alternative, logical explanations of life’s history are invalid because they “humanize” God by giving him such rights as to sacrifice control, to experiment, to learn as he goes along, to enjoy his creations; and yet your God probably thinks as we do and has similar thought patterns and emotions.
These […] are alternative, logical explanations, and you can find no fault with them. You even support them with your comment about his probable nature.

DAVID: Logical human thoughts given to God by a human. […]
In stark contrast to illogical human thoughts imposed on God by you.

The issue of free will as an example of God sacrificing control is dealt with on the “language” thread.

DAVID: We left the trees because we could with the changes we were given by God.

dhw: Once again we have your God fiddling with legs and pelvises and then telling our ancestors: “Now go and live on the ground” – just as apparently he did with whales: “Here are your flippers, so go and live in the water”, and to all of them: “I’ll be popping in at intervals to fiddle with other bits of your anatomy until you pre-Sapiens and pre-whales turn into Sapiens and whales – though to tell you the truth, I only really want to create H.Sapiens anyway.”

This point remains unanswered.

DAVID: Your problem is that you do not accept the human degree of specialness as Adler and I do.

I do accept it, as I have repeated over and over again. But I do not accept the COMBINATION of your beliefs, which is why I keep listing them in order to show their logical disconnectedness.

DAVID: Instead you quote Shapiro and large organism chauvinism.

Not instead! This is an example of your own distortions, which I keep repeating and which you ignore. “Large organisms chauvinism” concerns the reluctance of people like yourself to recognize intelligence in other organisms, including bacteria. That is not an attack on your anthropocentric theory of how God thinks, but on your unwillingness even to consider the logic of Shapiro’s theory.

DAVID: Dhw, you are better than you think you are. We are God's special goal as our magnificent brain tells us.

We may be a special goal, and I have offered you two explanations of human history which allow for that possibility (experimentation or ongoing thought processes that result in our being a latecomer to his thinking).

DAVID: Based on prior history of evolution before we arrived, we should not be here. Our current brain is a miracle as is life itself. You are a great example of one of those miracles.

Thank you for the compliment, which is returned. However, based on the WHOLE history of life, nothing “should be here” except single-celled organisms. That presumably is why you insist that only your God could have designed every other life form, econiche, strategy, lifestyle and natural wonder. Not illogical in itself. Only illogical when you continue to insist that although he specially designed all of these, the only thing he wanted to design was us.