David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 18, 2020, 16:13 (1738 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I don’t know what you mean by “beneath his advance notice”. Are you now saying that every minor tornado or flood is a dabble? I’m sure all the victims will kneel and thank your God for his lovingkindness. I would have expected his dabbles to be major (the biblical flood, or Chicxulub, with a view to changing the course of evolution).

DAVID: I do to. 'Beneath His advance notice' comes from my concept that God sets major processes in motion, as in major weather patterns, but resultant tornadoes appear as as result, not directly due to Him.

I will take this as meaning that he either preprogrammed or dabbled every environmental change that accompanied every new life form. The only problem that remains is that if you regard Chixculub as a dabble, he obviously didn’t preprogramme it, which means he had not planned everything in advance. Is it possible that such dabbling took place as a result of his not being satisfied with the status quo? Maybe experimenting, or learning as he went along, or changing his plans? Please give us your own theory as to why he would intervene with a dabble if he knew from the very start exactly what he wanted and exactly how to get it.

dhw: Why should your God not behave in a logically understandable way, especially when you agree he probably “has similar thought patterns and emotions”?

DAVID: My quote, bolded, as usual out of context […]

dhw: How can the quotes be out of context, and how can they mean anything other than what they say? “He very well could think like us”; “He probably has similar thought patterns and emotions”; “He probably does have some of our attributes.” Of course he’s not human, but that is no reason to assume that his thought patterns must be incomprehensible to us.

DAVID: All my quotes are true judgments about God, just as yours try to be..

Good. So your "true judgment of God" is that he may have similar thought patterns to ours.

DAVID: Of course His thoughts are not incomprehensible. We just do not know what His reasons are for his methodology and goals. You never follow my reasoning from your own strange humanizing of God.

There is no reasoning on your part. You agree that he may have human attributes, but when I offer you various comprehensible reasons for his actions, you tell us not to “humanize” him”! Then you say we shouldn’t try to find reasons for what you believe to have been his methods in pursuit of what you believe to have been his goal! Why? Because we can’t know them and can only guess at them – as if your whole theory was not a collection of guesses about something you can’t know! See below.

dhw: Now please tell me why, if it is possible that he has some human attributes, a theory endowing him with some human attributes is out of bounds. And tell me why, for instance, it is less human to be a control freak than to be an interested onlooker.

DAVID: Just remember, all guesses, all logical at a human level.

So tell me why these different logical human guesses should not be taken just as seriously as your own illogical human guess.

dhw: The rest of your post continues to flog the dead horse of humanization, with added appeals to the authority of a philosopher and theologian named Adler, highly respected by the Catholic Church, who has nothing to say about those parts of your theory that defy logic.

DAVID: Only your lack of understanding how tohink about God gets in the way.

Sorry, but who decides how one should think about God? Why is it a lack of understanding if one looks for and finds a possible God’s possible human attributes as logical explanations for his possible handling of evolution? Why is it more “understanding” to impose an illogical combination of purpose, nature and method on your God and then to tell us we shouldn’t try to explain it? Perhaps what you really mean is that my logical way of thinking about God gets in the way of my accepting your illogical way of thinking about him.

Under: "A virus with unrelated new genes"
DAVID: Can this virus be part of common descent?

DAVID: over 90% of genes are entirely new, and the remainder only distantly related to known genes. Where did this come from? Did it invent itself or was it designed. Evolution gets stranger and stranger.

dhw: More to the point, perhaps, is why you think your God would have separately designed this particular virus when all he wanted to do was design H. sapiens.

DAVID: Simple: all part of a required econiche. Like the turtles it is echoniches all the way down, although with evolution it is all the way up.

Yes, all life obviously depends on balanced econiches, and when the balance changes, the econiche changes. Nothing whatsoever to do with your theory that all econiches were designed to cover the time until your God could produce H. sapiens.

Under "Reintroduction of bison":
DAVID: Makes the same point as always. Econiches are extremely important for life to exist in diverse proportions.

Yes indeed, the same obvious point as always. Nothing whatsoever to do with your anthropocentric theory of evolution.