Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, September 08, 2020, 11:59 (1535 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: My God doesn't need to experiment to reach his purposes. He simply decided to evolve us by direct design of each stage.

dhw: But your God designed every single life form although he only wanted to design one. That is the combination of premises that makes no sense. He decided to do it that way is not a logical explanation. Experimentation is. You don’t have to accept it. But it provides a logical link between two of your otherwise incompatible premises, as do my other logical alternatives.

DAVID: Digging into God's reasoning. Try this: God as a creator decided to have fun in each and every new stage of invention as evolution progressed. He enjoyed evolving. So it took time, so what! He deals with all of eternity. My tongue-in-cheek supposition of a humanized God to fit your thinking about God. God is purposeful.

Why tongue-in-cheek? Enjoyment of his own creative powers is one logical explanation for the comings and goings of life’s history (‘as a painter enjoys his own paintings’ was the way you put it once). That is a purpose in itself. But if you say his one and only purpose was to directly design H. sapiens, you set yourself the problem summarized in my bolded first sentence above.

DAVID: Why God made that choice of His method are for His reasons. Perfectly logical.

dhw: It is perfectly logical that God did whatever he did for his own reasons. But it is YOU who have chosen the method and it is YOU who have chosen the purpose, and it is the combination of YOUR two premises that is not logical. Please stop assuming that YOUR guesses are facts. If they don’t add up, maybe one or other or both of them are wrong.

DAVID: I don't use your brain as an adding machine for my thoughts about God. God choosing to evolve us is totally logical.

But by evolve you mean directly design, and what is not logical is that he also “chose” to evolve (= directly design) millions and millions of now extinct non-human life forms and food supplies although his one and only purpose was to directly design us. Why do you keep focusing on ONE premise, when you know perfectly well that is it the COMBINATION of your premises that is not logical? Please stop it, or we shall go on repeating ourselves indefinitely.

dhw: So bearing in mind your statement that every living form was/is “part of the goal of evolving humans”, are you saying that human complexity could not have “evolved” (i.e. been directly designed, in your terms) by your God if he hadn’t designed the “natural wonder” of the dodder plant? Or we could not have had our food supply without it?

DAVID: All life is a web of necessary relationships. We humans have learned that the hard way as we disrupted ecosystems.

Yes, we know that each ecosystem is a web of relationships, but you are trying to tell us that ALL ecosystems since the year dot are interrelated and are “part of the goal of evolving humans”, so are you saying that he directly designed the dodder plant’s way of life because humans could not exist without it? Of course you’re not. And that is what makes nonsense of your theory. If your purposeful God directly designed the dodder plant, his purpose in doing so had nothing to do with evolving humans. Alternatively, maybe he didn’t directly design this natural wonder, but the symbiosis was created (theistic version) by two organisms autonomously using their perhaps God-given form of intelligence to design their own mode of survival.

dhw: My question was: if you bother to make your guesses, why shouldn’t I bother to do the same?

DAVID: Yes, bother, while I try and hold your suppositions to reasonable extensions of known facts.

How odd! That is precisely what I have tried to do for you! The only “facts” we have agreed on are that life began with simple forms and these mushroomed into a vast variety of forms, 99% of which are extinct, and the latest and by far the most intelligent of which is H. sapiens. Can you think of any other facts? You have accepted that all my theistic proposals (not suppositions) are reasonable extensions of these facts, but you have no idea how to combine your separate suppositions into a coherent whole, except that your God must have had his reasons for doing what you suppose he did.