Clever Corvids: the cortical equivalent in many birds (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, October 02, 2020, 12:26 (1303 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Round and round. That God chose to evolve us from bacteria is no dodge. Each stage purposeful.

dhw: Please tell us in what way your God’s design of the dinosaur and the dodo (plus a few million other dead life forms) provided a stage in the design of H. sapiens.

DAVID: Silly question. That is the way evolution works.

Silly answer. You insist that your God designed every species, and that every dead life form was “part of the goal of evolving humans”. How was designing the dinosaurs and the dodo part of the goal of designing humans?

DAVID: Choosing to evolve us requires exactly what you question. Thinking with a mind is the same for all who can think, including God.

dhw: Ah, so when you say he thinks as we do, all you mean is that he has got a mind. Got it! Unfortunately, that doesn’t help us to find a reason why he would directly design the dinosaur and the dodo when all he wanted to design was us.

DAVID: He wanted to design all of evolution, as history shows with humans as the endpoint. He understood the whole bush of life is necessary as a food supply for all. Especially with the ever rising size of the human population.

Why were 3.X billion years’ worth of food supplies for millions of now extinct organisms necessary in order to feed humans who had not yet appeared on the planet?

DAVID: No one can know God's exact thoughts. We both interpret the results of God's actions very differently.

dhw: But you reach definite decisions and talk of absolutes, even though you can’t find ANY logical reasons why he would have applied your choice of his method to fulfil your choice of his purpose. Furthermore, you reject my alternative possibilities, even though you can understand their logic. I know of atheists whose approach to these subjects is very similar to yours. They reach a definite decision concerning God’s existence and refuse to listen to your cogent and logical arguments- for design. Can you think of a word that describes this
approach? {Sadly you didn’t come up with one!]

DAVID: We both know no one can read the mind of God. Since He is capable of direct creation of the universe with the Big Bang, it seems He could have created humans directly, but we know He didn't.

And that is your problem. It is not unreasonable to assume that your God, if he exists, did what he WANTED to do. He didn’t directly create humans. So maybe he DID want to create humans, but didn’t know how to do it. Or maybe when he started the process of evolution, it was NOT because he wanted to create humans – but maybe he WANTED to create an ever changing bush of life.

DAVID (transferred from the “error” thread): Your thinking finally understands my theory. Of course He wanted all of the evolutionary stages on the way to humans, which are His final goal. The lack of understanding all these years shows your basic bias from the beginning. Your statement that He only wanted humans was your rigid misinterpretation of my thoughts all along.

But I keep asking you how the dodo and the dinosaur plus millions of extinct life forms can be called stages on the way to humans, in the sense that they were all “part of the goal of evolving humans”. You have consistently argued that your God’s purpose in creating life was to create H. sapiens. Sometimes you dilute this to “prime purpose” or “a goal” instead of “the” goal, and when asked what other goals there might be, you come up with none. I am proposing that the ever-changing great bush of life is what your God WANTED. And although I also propose that the bush is the result of him not wanting a predictable show (hence organisms having a free rein), your own belief that he specially designed every extinct non-human organism renders your anthropocentric theory even less likely.

DAVID: You rigidly can't make a choice when choices are obvious, and I rigidly stick to my choices all based on reasonable evidence. There is your word.

There is no “obvious” theistic choice, because as you rightly say, nobody can read your God’s mind. You rigidly stick to your one choice, and can't find any reason for it except that all the extinct life forms were necessary to feed humans who didn’t yet exist. “Reasonable evidence”?