Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, June 16, 2020, 20:14 (1619 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: 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: We have totally different version of God's personality. Your god clearly pursues human thinking.

dhw: I offer different versions. You offer only one, which leads to the illogicality of the bolded theory above. Since we cannot know your God’s personality, how can we exclude the possibility that the creator has certain thought patterns that are similar to those of his creation? You said the same yourself, though now you wish you hadn’t!

Illogical only to you. My purposeful God uses the process of evolution in each stage from the Big Bang on, enumerated many times previously.

dhw: If God exists, then of course he had a purpose for creating the universe and life. We are in agreement. Our only disagreement concerns what his purpose was, and how he fulfilled it, so of course we focus on life’s evolution! For some reason, you limit his purpose to the creation of H. sapiens, but you refuse to tell us what was his purpose in creating H. sapiens. And you cannot tell us why, if his only purpose was H. sapiens, he directly created 3.X billion years’ worth of non-humans etc.

DAVID: My same old answer: God is in charge of the creation of reality. Evolution produced humans, the most unexpected, unusual result as outlined by Adler.

dhw: Fine. But you keep telling us that H. sapiens was his one and only purpose, so why did he spend 3.X billion years designing anything but the only thing he wanted to design?

As usual because humans were the end goal of the evolutionary process He prefers to use, as noted above.

dhw: I offer you various hypotheses – all of which you recognize as logical – which allow for H. sapiens as a prime purpose, or which offer a different purpose, or which offer different interpretations of God’s powers (maybe he experiments, maybe he learns).

DAVID: All humanizing hypotheses. My God knows exactly what He is doing. No need to learn or experiment.

dhw: A) How do you know? B) Why can't you answer my question?

As below, because you cannot accept the God I believe exists.

dhw: Please, either find a logical connection or admit (once more) that there isn't one, and then we can stop going round in circles.

DAVID: My God is not your god. That is why the argument is in circles. We are not arguing about the same God. My God has the right to chose to evolve humans from bacteria. Not 'inexplicable' because I have no need to explain it. It is your problem, not mine.

dhw: You know very well that it is not a question of God’s rights but of finding a coherent explanation for the history of evolution. But you are right. I have asked you to provide a link between your different fixed beliefs. You clearly cannot do so, but there is no need for you to answer. I simply shouldn’t question your fixed beliefs.

Your non-acceptance of God leads you to incoherent thoughts about my view of God. It seems that you can only think of Him as having human problems in running evolution without a direct purpose, so He experiments or changes his mind in mid stream with humans a late thought.