Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, September 08, 2020, 15:29 (1535 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

I have no problems in my reasoning. Your problem is the God you envision is not the God I recognize, so we remain far apart.

dhw: What 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.

I don't know what you think in arriving at a position that God cannot choose to evolve us (design stages) over the time involved. All perfectly logical to me. We simply disagree.

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.

dhw: 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.

Of course, lots of individual parts of the web of life have no direct relationship to humans, but the indirect relationship is food supply for a huge human population.

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.

dhw: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.

Your simplistic review of our facts is exactly my complaint about your thinking. For each and every areas of discussion I've introduced anatomical and biochemical reasons why design is required. You try and ignore most of them. There are obvious examples all over these discussions.