Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, June 22, 2020, 11:00 (1613 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: I am fully and sometimes painfully aware of the fact that the living body contains countless parts that can go wrong! And I am perfectly happy with your belief that your all-powerful God was incapable of making a body that didn’t go wrong. I am simply pointing out that your interpretation limits his powers, and I don’t understand why you regard this is less “humanizing” than a God who experiments and/or learns as he goes along.

DAVID: What you are saying is that if God can't make perfect errorless biochemistry of life, He is imperfect and therefore human. But there is no errorless biochemistry. With all He has created perfectly He is not human and has no humanized thinking as you describe, as in experimenting.

He has “created perfectly” an error-strewn system! That’s a new definition of perfection! If God exists, he created biochemistry. We know that there is no errorless biochemistry, so God created biochemistry with errors. If you say he was incapable of creating errorless biochemistry, you are limiting his powers. Nobody in his right mind would claim that God is human, but you have absolutely no inside knowledge enabling you to claim that he does not have some thought patterns similar to ours – as you stated categorically and keep struggling to forget – or that he has not been experimenting, or learning as he goes along. These theistic hypotheses are no more subjective, speculative and unprovable than your three fixed beliefs listed below.

dhw: For the umpteenth time, the history of evolution is the coming and going of millions of life forms, econiches etc., with humans arriving at the end of the history we know. If God exists, then God caused the history. You are on perfectly logical ground. What is not history but is personal interpretation of history is that 1) God is all-powerful and all-knowing and always in control; 2) God’s one and only purpose right from the start was to produce H. sapiens; 3) God directly designed millions of now extinct life forms, econiches etc., which have no conceivable relevance to the one and only life form you say he wanted to produce. The “dodge” is illustrated by your statements above, which manage to leave out all three of these fixed beliefs, and therefore leave out the insoluble problem of combining 1) and 2) with 3), because if 1) and 2) are true, you cannot explain why he would have done 3).

DAVID:It is your problem entirely. I accept God, you don't, and you have no reason to follow my logic to my end point. Don't try if you cannot. The bold is my belief, and your three objections are all yours because you do not accept the bold. Is there any more to discuss on this point?
And DAVID: You constantly disallow God's right to choose a method of evolution. We stay in full disagreement with no resolution.

I have accepted the bolded belief, and since I believe evolution happened, it would be absurd to disallow your God’s right to choose a method of evolution! That is not the subject in dispute, and my agnosticism is totally irrelevant. I have pointed out that your three fixed beliefs create an unanswerable problem of logic, whereas you agree that all my alternative theistic explanations of your God’s method of evolution are perfectly logical. But they entail the sacrifice of one or other of your fixed beliefs, none of which are grounded in the history. Even if you reject my alternatives on the grounds that they entail human patterns of thought similar to ours – although you agree that your God probably has human patterns of thought similar to ours – that is still no solution to the logical problem (still being dodged) posed by the three irreconcilable hypotheses on which your theory of evolution is based.