Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, September 09, 2020, 07:10 (1534 days ago) @ David Turell

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. [dhw: Now bolded below.]

DAVID: 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.

I have two problems. One is your refusal to accept the illogicality of your theory that your all-powerful God, whose one and only purpose was to directly design H. sapiens and food supply, directly designed millions of now extinct non-human life forms, natural wonders etc. before even starting to directly design the only life form plus food supplies that he wanted to design. And the second problem is your non-stop dodging of this issue, either by leaving out different parts of the theory or by changing the subject, as you do later.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: 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.

Same again. Just ONE premise, leaving out his all-powerfulness, and the claim that he also directly designed millions of other non-human life forms that had nothing to do with us, although we were his one and only purpose. Please stop dodging.

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: 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.

And so you leave out 3.X billion years’ worth of non-human life forms and food supplies etc. which have nothing to do with humans or our food supply, and you still haven’t explained why your God designed the dodder plant. Our evolution didn’t depend on it, and I really don’t think our food supply depends on it. And I suspect that if it went extinct, the human race would somehow manage to survive. And yet according to you, he specially designed the dodder plant, and all evolution is “part of the goal of evolving humans” (plus their food supply).

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.

DAVID: 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.

And this time the dodge is to change the subject. Our discussion is not design – the logic of which I have always accepted. It’s about your illogical theory of evolution and the logical theistic alternatives I have proposed, every one of which entails design by your purposeful God.