David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, April 30, 2020, 19:47 (1666 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: I do note your changes of mind, and look forward to more of them as we tackle the problems together:
April 5: I now think God directly dabbles most advances/new speciation and preprogramming may have a minor role.
April 23(?): It is certainly possible that an all-powerful, all-knowing God never has to dabble.

dhw: And today: hands-on all the way, i.e. a permanent dabble. So he has to directly create lots of different species over thousands of millions of years, but then wait for more oxygen so he can directly create totally different species, and directly organize mass extinctions in order to directly get rid of all the species, econiches, strategies, natural wonders which he directly created but doesn’t want, because all he wants to directly create is H. sapiens. And apparently this makes sense.

It does to me if we take it that God is totally in charge as He evolves Earth, and as He evolves lifev wshen the earth is ready for each stage.

[…]
DAVID: Your alternative hypotheses are almost always humanizing His possible desires.

dhw: If, as you have said yourself and I have to repeat ad nauseam, he probably/possibly has thought patterns and emotions and attributes similar to ours, it is patently absurd to dismiss alternatives just because they allow for him having thought patterns and emotions and attributes similar to ours.'

That doesn't answer my objections to giving Him human purposes. He is not human, suirely understands our emotions and may not have them Himself.

dhw: Who made it necessary for him to specially design H. sapiens by specially designing and destroying everything listed above?

What 'who'? He simply evolved us from previously evolved primates. We are more specially designed because He created our big-sized brain giving us an e enormous capacity for conceptualization

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.

DAVID: All extinctions I've just listed were due to changing events on an evolving Earth.

dhw: Obviously. And presumably your hands-on God changed them after taking all that trouble to design the things he destroyed.

You refuse to accept the idea God evolved life until He got to us as a final step.

DAVID: 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.

dhw: Same as above: your totally-in-control, all-powerful, hands-on God could find no other way to specially design H. sapiens than to specially design and destroy billions of non-human life forms, econiches, strategies, lifestyles and natural wonders. And even today, how could we humans survive if God didn’t give nest-building lessons to weaverbirds, and camouflage lessons to cuttlefish and farming courses to ants? With his hands-on approach, he even specially designed Covid-19 to test us. But any alternative to this hypothesis of yours is unthinkable, because – I’ll repeat it as often as you make me repeat it - it might endow God with some human thought patterns, emotions or attributes, although he probably/possibly has human thought patterns, emotions or attributes. I eagerly await your next change of mind.

I haven't changed my mind. My God controls evolution. He is not human and may not have any of our emotions, but He understands them. You accept design which keeps you from atheism, and your mind, contaminated by religious teachings in your youth, has you make fun of my views of God. All I've started with is there must by a greater power. The rest is all in my imagination as to how it must work as an unimaginably powerful mind.