Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, June 06, 2020, 12:33 (1629 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Since it is very difficult to imagine a set of circumstances to force or induce cicadas into this pattern of life, God may well have had a role. Just how is only guesswork, which must include my proposals as to how God works His intentions. The insects are just another part of the necessary bush of life created by God's method of evolution.

dhw: You have only ever offered preprogramming or personal dabbling as your God’s “role”, and I eagerly await your explanation for the role of the cicadas in fulfilling your God’s one and only intention of producing H. sapiens. God’s method of evolution provided bushes of life necessary for every life form that ever existed, long, long before H. sapiens arrived.

DAVID: All I can offer is they play a role in their econiche.

Yes of course they do. Every organism lives or lived in an econiche! I just wonder why your God created all those extinct organisms and econiches if all he wanted to create was H. sapiens and his econiches.

dhw: Why is it not natural for an intelligent organism to observe, learn and communicate?

DAVID: They must have the mental power of an understood correlation of separate events. Why do you know they have that?

dhw: How do you "know" they DON'T? Intelligence is manifested every time they initiate a strategy, lifestyle, response to changing conditions, and their behaviour indicates that they are able to observe, learn and communicate. How do you "know" that your God preprogrammed or dabbled every single strategy, lifestyle, response?

DAVID: How do you know they weren't taught to do that? What we see mostly is instinctual activity. We do not know how it developed.

And that is why we theorize. Thank you for the “mostly”. It is the non-instinctive, problem-solving, decision-making activities that suggest intelligence, and these also suggest that current strategies would have arisen from the same source. Your theory of evolution discounts intelligence altogether, which leaves you with no alternative to your God’s preprogramming or dabbling every life form etc. as bolded below.

dhw: My complaint is your insistence that although he had only one purpose, to specially design H. sapiens, and could have done it any way he chose, he specially designed millions of now extinct non-human life forms, econiches, lifestyles and natural wonders before even starting to design the only thing he wanted to design. Please stop dodging.

DAVID: Same weird response. Evolving humans took the time it took. You grant the validity of the process and then complain about it.

Evolving EVERY life form took the time it took! That does not explain why your God specially designed all those extinct life forms if the only life form he wanted to design was us. PLEASE STOP DODGING!

dhw: […] all this discussion about Adler is irrelevant. My discussion is with you, not with him, and if you can’t find an explanation for this part of your theory, then your faith in Adler is not going to help you.

DAVID: My explanations are satisfactory for me. Your objections are always complete non-sequiturs: you allow God can choose to evolve humans, but He shouldn't have done it the way history tells us it happened.

In your theory, your God could and did evolve (= directly design in your strange use of language) EVERY life form – not just humans. And so it does not make sense to claim that he only wanted to design humans!