David's theory of evolution: God's error corrections II (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, October 03, 2020, 11:42 (1510 days ago) @ David Turell

I am telescoping three threads, as they overlap.

DAVID (under “clever corvids”): 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.

dhw: 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: Now you propose God can't foresee the future?

I have no idea. My theory is based on him deliberately creating an unpredictable world that would be less dull than a Garden of Eden. And I’m afraid that if God really could foresee the future, you would have problems defending your concept of free will. Your question is irrelevant anyway: the problem with your theory is that it makes no sense if a God who only wants to design H. sapiens proceeds to design millions of extinct non-human forms and their food supplies in order to feed humans before they even exist!

The rest of this post goes over old ground, and I’ll skip to your final answer to this conundrum:

DAVID: […] Extinct life plays no role in current time. The huge bush of life is in present time for our huge population to use now.

Precisely. If your God only wanted to design H. sapiens, and extinct life plays no role now, why did he design the huge bush of extinct life that preceded the current bush? In other words, how can the extinct bush possibly be “part of the goal of evolving humans” if it plays no role in current time?

xxx

dhw: And I have offered you a purpose: instead of a “dull” Garden of Eden, he wanted a mixture of good and bad. But he did NOT directly design the goodies and the baddies. He designed a mechanism which enabled organisms to “steer their own evolutionary course” (see the Paul Davies post). Now setting aside your own fixed beliefs, please tell me why this is not feasible.

DAVID: We still differ on a view of God's personality. It is your 'feasible' version of possibilities, not mine.

But you don’t have any version. I asked you who designed bad bacteria and viruses, and you wrote: “I think God did for some purpose we do not understand.” If you don’t understand it, it doesn’t make sense to you. Does my proposal make sense to you? If it doesn’t, please explain why.

dhw: ...your theory is that your God operated on a particular group of apes before they descended, although initially he only did part of the necessary operation, because there are fossils which indicate that the early pre-humans were still partially living in trees. So he sort of operated a bit at a time. And you find this less preposterous than the idea that a group of apes descended for a reason (maybe to make a better living) and the new way of life took them off their knuckles and, a bit at a time, in different stages - corresponding to the different operations you think your God must have conducted for every new advance - changed the structure of the anatomy, including the brain, skull and pelvis. (And why all the different operations if he knew all along that he just wanted to produce H. sapiens?)

DAVID: My God decided to evolve humans in evolutionary stages, not all at once, and you and I don't know why. We will never know why. God always prepares for a future Her desires. The surprise attitude of your first sentence reflects how you view the way God works in my thoughts

You have not expressed this very well. It is your theory that your God decided to evolve (i.e. directly design) humans in stages and you don’t know why. My proposal is that if he exists, he did NOT decide to evolve them in stages, precisely because it doesn’t make sense (you don’t know why he worked that way). But there is another possible explanation for the fact that they DID evolve in stages, and that is the last, now bolded part of my comment which for some reason you have completely ignored. (Please don't fall back on the claim that this excludes God, as you know very well that the theistic premise would be that God invented the mechanism enabling them to make the changes in response to their new environment and way of life.)

Under “The presence of life evolves the Earth”:

QUOTE: "Our results emphasize the importance of the interplay between environmental/climate change, ecosystem stability, and environmental limits to diversity for diversification processes. The study also provides a new understanding of evolutionary dynamics in long-lived ecosystems."

DAVID: Just more evidence of my point that life interacts with the earth to cause evolutionary changes to the Earth.

Fair enough. But why don’t you acknowledge the importance of the interplay for diversification of life forms?