Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, June 14, 2020, 11:09 (1621 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The bold is your problem, as usual. Of course there is no absolute proof God did anything. But it is my belief He created reality and everything I explain follows logically from that. […]

dhw: And so you continue to dodge: God created reality, his sole purpose was to create H. sapiens and apparently it follows logically that he directly designed 3.X billion years’ worth of non-human life forms and econiches etc. before directly designing various humans before directly designing H. sapiens. And you think this is a logical sequence.

DAVID: It is totally logical if you accept that a God-in-charge allows the conclusion that since evolution occurred He close to run all of it until humans appeared. You just never accept that He 'chose' to do it the way we see.

I accept totally that if God exists, he would have chosen what we see: millions and millions of life forms, econiches, lifestyles, natural wonders coming and going for millions and millions of years, and eventually different forms of humans ultimately leading to one species of human. That does not explain why, if he is all-powerful and had only one purpose from the very beginning (H. sapiens), he would have directly designed all those extinct life forms etc. that had nothing to do with humans. So maybe H. sapiens was not his only purpose from the beginning, or maybe if H. sapiens was his purpose from the beginning, everything that preceded humans was part of a great experiment, or maybe the idea for humans only came late on in his thinking.

DAVID: Try accepting that God had the right to chose evolving humans. That is the first step in a series of logical conclusions, that you always avoid.

If you mean he had the right to make H. sapiens his one and only purpose, I have dealt with that above.

DAVID: The next step is to accept history as describing His actions. Extending your weird objection, why is the universe so old? Your reasoning applies here. Why wait 13.8 billion years to create humans on Earth? By your contorted thinking, God could have produced the Milky Way at the same time, the Earth at the same time, and humans at the same time.

That is not my way of thinking at all! My starting point is the history, whereas yours is God’ purpose, which you try to impose on the history! And it doesn’t work. If God exists, I would see him as a scientist systematically putting together all the bits and pieces that were necessary for life. Of course they took time. None of us know why he wanted to create life in the first place. But if he started life with single cells, and those single cells eventually merged and cooperated into a huge variety of organisms, I would assume that he wanted a huge variety of organisms. I would not assume that he directly designed them all (he could have given them the intelligence to do their own designing), and I would not assume that the one and only reason why he wanted a huge variety of organisms was for him eventually to directly design H. sapiens. That is why I propose a variety of explanations for the variety of organisms that preceded H. sapiens. You have accepted that all of them are logical, but you are unable to find any connection between the vast variety of pre-human organisms plus their econiches and your proposal that he only wanted one plus its econiches.