Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, August 15, 2020, 12:12 (1559 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: There is no link between your two sentences. If I believed in God, then of course he would be purposeful. None of my alternative theories leave him without a purpose! You are of course free to reject all of them – as you do – on the grounds that they entail human attributes, although you agree that he probably has human attributes.But your rejection will not in any way fill the gap of illogicality between an all-powerful God’s single purpose (H. sapiens and food supply) and his direct design of the higgledy-piggledy bush of millions of extinct life forms etc. which had nothing to do with his single purpose.

DAVID: I've fully explained my version of why God conducted evolution as He did to produce us. Simply, one more repeat, God chose to evolve us. We were evolved, weren't we? Nothing illogical.

Simply one more repeat: The question which you have, as always, omitted and cannot answer is why, if his ONLY purpose was to evolve (in your language = directly design) us and our food supply, he first evolved (= designed) millions of non-human life forms and their food supplies which had nothing to do with us. Your failure to answer this question, together with your rejection of any other theistic explanation of life’s history and your God’s possible purpose(s) and method(s), is what causes this discussion to go on and on and on.

DAVID: Why startled at your usual distortion? You accept history above and then reject it. Talk about inconsistency!

dhw: Please explain why my bolded statement [“…from the very beginning the only life forms he wanted were H. sapiens and his food supply”] distorts your theory that “we were his purpose all along”. Where have I rejected history? It is your interpretation of history that I reject!

DAVID: You call my version of evolutionary history run by God as illogical. It isn't. It assumes God is in charge of every event starting with the Big Bang and follows his purpose for creation.

I have not distorted your theory and I have not rejected history. I have explained above (for the thousandth time) why your theory is illogical. It is now rendered even more illogical by your claim that he is charge of every event, and yet he cannot control the random errors of his molecular system but “allows” some of them to change the course of evolution – which clearly shows that if his purpose for creation was a single species plus its food supply, he could not have planned and directly designed every stage of evolution as has been your constant argument on this thread.

dhw: My God would also be teleologically driven, and I have explained how different purposes might lead to the history of life as we know it. There is nothing namby-pamby about a God experimenting, learning as he goes along, or designing life for the pleasure of creation, or because – as you have suggested – he wants to have a life form that will appreciate his work or even have a relationship with him. I can imagine any of these purposes as his driving force, and all of them can fit in with the history of life as we know it. But you won’t allow your imagined God to have any purpose beyond the creation of H. sapiens, and you won’t allow him to give organisms the freedom to design themselves and their own ways of surviving, and it is these restrictions imposed by you on your God which lead to the logical impasse bolded above.

DAVID: You have not negated your humanized view of God. We don't know any of God's reasons for His actions. They are all guesses, but the bolded repeat of my suggested reason is one I can favor since God has consciousness and we are the only forms with it also.

Of course I haven’t negated any of my alternative interpretations of God’s nature, purpose and method. Why should I, when even you agree that your God probably has thought patterns etc. similar to ours? I appreciate your favouring at least one of them, which is perhaps the most “humanizing” of them all. Do you find it namby-pamby? But it leaves you with a problem. If God wanted to design an organism that would appreciate his work and have a relationship with him, why would he have first directly designed (your definition of evolution) millions of now extinct organisms - all complete in themselves - that were incapable of appreciating his work and having a relationship with him?