Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, September 10, 2020, 11:33 (1533 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: I've dodged nothing, like you just did. I believe God chose to evolve humans from bacteria. Where is your discussion of that point above? In the past you have agreed if He is in charge He could have made that choice.

I do not have a problem with your belief in that premise. The problem is your effort to combine it with the other bolded premises. That is why I keep asking the next question:

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: No dodge except by you. All-powerful means He has the right to create history any way "He wishes. And we have the history.

Of course he has the right. But that does not mean your interpretation of the history is correct. All-powerful means that if his one and only purpose was to directly design (your definition of evolution) H. sapiens plus food supply, it makes no sense for him to have directly designed millions of now extinct non-human life forms and their food supplies before doing the only thing he wanted to do. History includes the vast pre-human bush. Possible explanations to eliminate this incongruity: maybe God is not all-powerful (I should add all-knowing, to encompass the hypotheses that he was experimenting or had new ideas as he went along), maybe he didn’t directly design all the life forms, maybe H. sapiens was not his one and only purpose.

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.

dhw: 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).

DAVID: I've left out nothing of God's creation of history. God is the creator

You’ve left out why he specially designed the dodder plant plus millions and millions of no longer existing life forms and natural wonders if his only purpose was to to specially design H. sapiens.

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.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: You have just stated that our difference is I don't humanize God and you do. Repeated from the start above:
"Your problem is the God you envision is not the God I recognize, so we remain far apart."

That was YOUR statement! Our difference is that you refuse to recognize the illogicality of your combined premises, and while acknowledging the logic of various alternative, theistic explanations of evolution, you reject them on the illogical grounds that they “humanize” God although you agree that he probably has thought patterns, emotions and other attributes similar to ours. You have a fixed belief, and no amount of reasoning will make you reconsider. So perhaps we should just leave it at that.