David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, February 25, 2020, 10:23 (1731 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Why do you constantly ignore God's right to choose His method of creation? I have concluded that is what God did as a very purposeful God.

dhw: Why do you constantly ignore a very purposeful God’s right to choose a purpose and method of creation different from the one you impose on him? He had every right to invent a mechanism that would give free rein to evolution (allowing for dabbles), and he had every right to create life as an experiment, or as an ever changing spectacle which he could enjoy as a painter enjoys his paintings (your image).

DAVID: My God is not the humanized one you describe. My God wants tight control to achieve His exact purposes. I ignore your fanciful versions of God with human thoughts, experimenting or allowing organisms to experiment.

Don’t you know of any human who wants tight control to achieve his exact purposes? I’m fully aware that you would like to ignore my different versions of God, just as you would like to ignore your own repeated agreement that he could very well think like us, probably has similar thought patterns and emotions to ours, and probably does have some of our attributes.

dhw: Please stop pretending that your interpretation of purpose and method is the only possible way to read your God’s mind.

DAVID: Read God's personality and purposes anyway you wish. I have my firm view of a God who is a personage like no other person, and we cannot read His mind to know His reasoning behind His revealed purposes, as shown by what exists.

No one in his right mind would believe that a God who can create a universe is like any other “person”, but if he is a personage, that does not stop him from having some of our attributes, as you keep admitting. What exists is the bush of life, and we cannot know his purposes (or did he “reveal” them to you?) or his nature or his methods, as I have shown by offering a number of alternatives, all of which you agree fit in logically with what exists.

dhw: You share Raup’s belief that “Extinctions are pure luck”, which means survival is also pure luck. I have no problem at all in accepting the possibility that your God left it to pure chance as to which species survived and which went extinct: that fits in perfectly with the concept of an ever changing spectacle. But I don’t see how “pure luck” fits in with the concept of a God whose one and only purpose is to create H. sapiens, who is always in total charge, who knows exactly how to fulfil his one and only purpose, and who specially designs every single species that ever existed and every major environmental change and every natural wonder and every econiche.

DAVID: Once again you have conflate a bunch of distortions and run wild with your imagination about my God, who is someone you cannot seem to imagine or accept as possible from my descriptions of His purposeful creations. M y God can never by your humanized version. God allows species to die as part of his plan. He doesn't change them to accommodate His plan for advancing evolution. Raup's view is from a Darwinian standpoint that their bad luck is due to a lack of adaptive speciation. Same result, from two different viewpoints. From any viewpoint, 99% of all species are gone, God's plan, Raup's luck.

I know you can’t accept any version of God that does not coincide with yours. As regards “luck”, it was you who quoted Raup and appeared to accept that extinction was “bad luck”. Allowing them to die by bad luck is not the same as planning which ones would survive. And I thought you believed in common descent, which would mean that he does change species to accommodate his plan for evolution! Just for the sake of clarity: did your God leave it to chance to decide which species survived and which went extinct?

DAVID: (re “a multicellular animal needs no oxygen”): Very unusual branch of evolution. Perhaps the host worm gives it a little oxygen. But it fits into its necessary econiche

Necessary for what? The evolution of H. sapiens?