David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, April 29, 2020, 19:24 (1667 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Why raise these issues, when I've discussed my own uncertainties about how God does it? Stick with my basic claim, God runs the process of evolution in a hands-on manner. It looks just like Darwin's common descent.

dhw: But doesn’t look like common descent in the Cambrian.

DAVID: Agreed, and it bugged Darwin. The 'Gap' must mean God did a giant engineering job to start our current phyla. No evidence of chance. Just like the start of life, with God doing that designing. During the rest of evolution it looks like He modified existing species.

dhw: Nothing to do with chance. We’re discussing your theistic theories of evolution. I appreciate your uncertainty, but not your unwillingness to pursue the implications of your theories. You insist that your God either preprogrammed or dabbled the whole of evolution. You now have him dabbling the Cambrian. But last week, dabbling denoted some sort of correction, i.e. a degree of weakness.

Note my changed mind, please. I've guessed in the past that God pre-programmed or dabbled when necessary. The third possibility is hands-on all the way. And in regard to the Cambrian, it is probable that God had to wait for enough oxygen to appear from the photosynthesis organisms to begin creating those very different organisms that needed it. Keep in mind God was evolving the Earth as He was evolving forms of life, so hands-on coordination makes lots of sense and does not mean weakness.

dhw: you put your foot down whenever I point out the contradictions that arise out of your certainties and propose a different hypothesis that has no contradictions. The most glaring example is the next one:

DAVID: Just accept the history as representing what God does and how He does it. Please try to remember, I have guessed as to how God does His creation, pre-programming or dabbling, but never experimenting.

dhw: I accept the history, but not your guess as to how and why he does it, or your blanket dismissal of ALL my theistic alternatives (again, experimenting is only one) with the absurd reason that although they are humanly logical, we mustn’t think of God as being humanly logical.

DAVID: God is not human, yet you have suddenly forgotten I'm certain He is logical as I've stated over and over.

dhw: You have indeed, but what is the point of insisting that your God is logical if you can’t find any logic behind the combination of purpose and method that you attribute to him?

The 'we' is you. I've fully explained logically.

DAVID: That does not mean He has desires similar to ours, like our enjoyment of spectacles.

dhw: But it does not mean that he doesn’t have desires similar to ours, and indeed you have told us that he probably (later changed to possibly) has thought patterns, emotions and attributes that ARE similar to ours. It is therefore absurd to reject alternative hypotheses that incorporate what you consider to be probable or at least possible.

Your alternative hypotheses are almost always humanizing His possible desires.

DAVID: He is obviously so easily inventive, the universe, a special planet Earth to support life, life itself, He does not need experimentation.

dhw: And yet apparently he needed to change his 3.8-billion-year-old programme for the whole of evolution in order to separately create all the new species of the Cambrian – a sign that something must have gone wrong, and yet there is no experimentation.

Fully explained above. All necessary timing, not experimentation.

dhw: And you still haven’t told us whether the mass extinctions were preprogrammed or dabbled, and if they were preprogrammed, why you think he bothered to create the extinct species in the first place, since all he wanted was H. sapiens plus necessary bush.

All extinctions I've just listed were due to changing events on an evolving Earth. God's work involved proper timing. Again your usual distortion: God started life with bacteria and evolved everything from that beginning. How else to get from there to here? Again implies impatiently skipping it all, a humanizing complaint.