Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Friday, June 19, 2020, 15:44 (1616 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: The errors are due to the high speed molecules making mistakes, not God's mistakes. Please note living biochemistry has many mistake screening backups in place, designed by God who knew mistakes would happen.

dhw: The system God invented from scratch makes mistakes. But God himself doesn’t make mistakes. He just knew that the system he had created from scratch would make mistakes. And this is not “humanizing”, whereas a God who experiments or who has new ideas as he goes along is impossible, because God always knows exactly what he’s doing and is always in control.

DAVID: All I have said is God's control of mistakes has limits.

dhw: And you ignore your own belief that God created the whole system from scratch. If the system he invented contains mistakes, who is responsible for the mistakes? I only ask because until now you’ve always insisted your God is all-powerful, all-knowing, totally in control, and any theory which suggests the contrary is “humanizing”. But making mistakes is apparently not “humanizing”.

The molecules follow rules of biochemistry. Please note the very high speed can induce errors, not God errors, but functional errors.

DAVID: Absolute proof, which you always require, does not exist. Choice involves reason with evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.

dhw: It is you who complain that my alternative “humanized” hypotheses are “without evidence”. Of course there is no absolute proof, and I do not require it. But I would love to know what evidence you have “beyond a reasonable doubt” for your belief that your God directly designed 3.x billion years’ worth of non-human life forms, and that he did so although his one and only purpose was to design H. sapiens, which he could have done any way he chose.

You refuse to accept the history of evolution which I use to understand what God in-charge- of-history did.

DAVID: I agree with you. We cannot know God's exact thoughts, or His reasons for His purposes. I have my reasonable theory being careful not to apply any human reasoning to God's thoughts. It is an entirely coherent theory, because what I do is just look to what Adler and I see as his prime purpose, humans, whose arrival cannot be explained in any other way than God did it. Let me ask you, since you never offer an opinion, please explain why we are here, with both of us recognizing we evolved from apes.

dhw: A new dodge to avoid the incoherence of your theory! And if I answer, you can keep dodging by complaining that my answer “humanizes” God. Firstly, you cannot apply any sort of reasoning to your theory, whose parts are disconnected. Secondly, the complexity of all life forms, including humans, is such that you can and do argue that their arrival “cannot be explained in any other way than God did it”. The design argument is not confined to humans! And thirdly, over and over again I have offered a hypothesis - not an opinion, since I don’t even know if God exists – that if he does exist, he could have created life as a spectacle that he could watch with interest, humans offering by far the most interesting spectacle, with their vast variety of behaviours. But I have no objection to your own hypotheses, offered at different times: a painter enjoying his own paintings, wanting to have his works admired, wanting to have some sort of relationship, and one might add wanting to be worshipped, since that keeps cropping up in religious ceremonies. As for our evolving from apes, I do believe that is true. I don’t know what relevance it is supposed to have to our being God’s one and only purpose (you keep switching to “prime” purpose, but have never told us what other purposes he may have had).

Your dodge is to ignore the history of evolution. I accept God did it. It is not a dodge on my part to state God wanted to produce humans, and they arrived at the end of the history we know.