Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, August 17, 2020, 09:17 (1557 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: [...] Your theory, however, tries to combine the biblical purpose with what we both believe to be the historical fact of evolution, with its vast bush of life forms irrelevant to humans and our food supply. The two theories simply don’t go together.

DAVID: As a believer in God it all fits together for me.

Your belief in God does not provide any explanation for your illogical belief in a theory that has him all-knowing and all-powerful, directly designing every life form and food supply in the history of life although his only goal was to provide one life form plus its food supply. And your belief in God does not provide any consistency between this theory and the new theory, in which he is not all-powerful and all-knowing, and had at most only partial control of the copy system he designed, and relied on random mutations to change the course of evolution as he faffed his way to what you believe to have been his one and only goal. I keep asking you – and now I’m begging you - to reconsider your theories, because they are becoming more and more confused.

DAVID: Your view of God's personality and His degree of purposeful activity is not my view of who He is. It never will be because what you offer is an indecisive God, not sure of where He is headed.

dhw: There is absolutely nothing indecisive about the view of God that I offer. All my alternative theories propose a particular goal and a straightforward pursuit of that goal. If I believed in God, I would find it impossible to believe that he did not have a purpose in creating life, and that he would not pursue that purpose directly. But among many options, I include the possibility that he wished to invent something he would enjoy, or might learn from, or might relate to, or might be surprised by. I do not believe that he would start out with a single purpose and then devote all his attention to designing things irrelevant to his single purpose. Nor do I believe that he would rely on random errors to help him design a single species (plus its food supply).

DAVID: What you constantly miss is the vast bush of food supply has to be developed from bacterial colonies. God anticipated the huge human population we now have. as for your God He is till wishy-washy and humanized.

What you constantly and perhaps deliberately miss is the illogicality of a God “having to” develop millions of extinct non-human life forms and their food supplies from bacteria if he only wanted to develop one life form and its food supplies from bacteria. And to complicate matters still further, your idea (prior to your new “error theory") of “developing” or “evolving” all these life forms has always been that your God designed them directly! The biblical version in fact makes far better sense if you think his only purpose was to create sapiens and his food supply, but you believe in evolution.

As for “my” God, in all my alternative theories he knows what he wants and performs all his wonders in direct fulfilment of his own wishes – in striking contrast to your God, who knows what he wants and either directly designs what he doesn’t want, or faffs around relying on chance to help him because he has little or no control over the system he invented.