Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, June 17, 2020, 11:56 (1618 days ago) @ David Turell

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!

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

Yes, he uses evolution. What is not logical is that he uses evolution to produce millions of now extinct life forms etc. although his one and only purpose is to produce H. sapiens! Please stop dodging.

DAVID: (under “congenital defects”) Or His tight control allowed the mistakes to happen because He anticipated our giant brain would solve the problems that appeared!

dhw: As usual, you seem to think life began with humans. And I really don’t see how “allowing mistakes to happen” ties in with tight control – but I’m not going to quarrel with your proposal that that he might not have tightly controlled evolution and might have “let it go on purposely”. That is one of the various explanations I have offered for the higgledy-piggledy history of evolution.

DAVID: It is easiest to discuss our problems which we know as current events. You are right the history is higgledy-piggledy, but I see purpose in creating the necessary econiches and your god is usually not that purposeful.

My version of God is that he was always purposeful. You cannot tell me the purpose of creating econiches for 3.X million years’ worth of extinct non-human life forms if his one and only purpose was to create humans and their econiches. And I keep offering you different hypotheses that link possible purposes with life’s history, and I even offer you a possible purpose for the creation of H. sapiens. What is the point of your constantly saying how purposeful your God is if you can’t tell us what that purpose might be?

DAVID: […] All we know is that there are biological errors in any living system operating at such high speed, and controls designed into it cannot stop everyone of them. That leaves us with: God did the best He could, and any better is impossible considering the necessary complexity of living organisms. I'll accept that.

dhw: Well, if you can accept that God did the best he could but he couldn’t avoid making mistakes (how extraordinarily human of him), I don’t see why you can’t accept the possibility that life’s bush was the product of his experiments, or H. sapiens came late on in his thinking. Why is that more “human” than making mistakes?

DAVID: I didn't say the biological errors were God's mistakes, but implied it is probably impossible for a high speed biochemical system to always be perfect. God cannot achieve that result which requires perfect molecular reactions at all times.

Since your God is supposed to have created absolutely everything from scratch, how can errors not be his? Once again, why is this fallibility less “humanizing” than experimentation, or having new ideas as he goes along?
[…]
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: 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.

Again, you dodge the issue of the missing link between the purpose you impose on your God and the history of life. My agnosticism is irrelevant. The object of this forum is to look for explanations of life that make sense, which is why we constantly test all the explanations on offer, as I keep doing. You have accepted that all my hypotheses logically link God’s possible purpose with life’s history. Yours doesn’t. But of course you have every right to believe what you want to believe.