Natures wonders: ants and other insects farm (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, May 24, 2020, 08:53 (1642 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Note I've limited this to changes within species, and never speciation on its own, which is what you wish could happen. Mo God speciates what He wants. That doesn't change.

dhw: Not a wish but a theory. You can limit your proposal if you like, but that doesn’t invalidate mine! Furthermore, the theory that your God set evolution in motion and let it continue (apart from dabbling) offers a perfectly logical explanation – in stark contrast to your own theory – for the WHOLE bush of life, extant and extinct, as you have repeatedly acknowledged. But you just don’t like it.

DAVID: The reason I always reject your God theory is the level of personality that I see for God.

I offer several levels because I do not have one “God theory”. You reject all my alternatives – including that of an all-powerful God who deliberately gives free rein to evolution – because you wish to stick rigidly to your one theory, despite the fact that you have no idea why your God’s all-powerful and all-controlling personality would lead him to pursue his one purpose by not pursuing his one purpose (designing us) before inexplicably pursuing other purposes (designing millions of non-human life forms, econiches, natural wonders etc.)

DAVID: You've implied I've agreed my theory is illogical. How strange! Both are logical, but in yours God's intentions are ignored in not recognizing God intended from 13.8 byo to produce us. He didn't start off wandering into the future. I'm with Adler.

You cannot explain the above bold, and so you persistently ignore its blatant illogicality. In one of my alternative theistic explanations of evolution, he does pursue the purpose you attribute to him (he has to experiment in order to produce the level of consciousness that is unique to ourselves) – but you can’t bear the thought of a God who doesn’t know everything right from the start, and so you prefer to have no explanation for the hands-on designing of anything-but-humans for 3.X billion years.

dhw: a) since we can’t know God’s thoughts, there can be no such judgement as “God-lite”, b) he has just as much right to create a self-directing form of evolution as one that he preprogrammes or dabbles, and c) your insistence that he is all-powerful and in control of everything is no less “humanizing” that any of my alternatives, all of which allow for one or other of your basic premises, whereas neither of us can find a logical way of COMBINING them.

DAVID: I am judging your thoughts as God-lite as you create above a very humanized version of the God I see.

You have not answered any of my points.