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

by David Turell , Sunday, October 18, 2020, 18:39 (1495 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: I accept the history of evolution, and it simply doesn’t fit in with your theory that your God only wanted to design one species and its food supply. (David’s bold)

DAVID: You keep forgetting we are discussing the fact that a very unusual species arrived at this point, which I think is the end of evolution. The bold is a gross distortion of my presented thinking. Yes, God decided, for some reasons known only to Him, to create humans. In choosing to evolve us from bacteria at the start of life, He knew everything that had to appear as He progressed with evolution. Humans were His goal, so it must be accepted God wanted to create all of the process of evolution and the final vast bush of life. That is a vastly different concept than your distorted bold above.

dhw: This is sheer muddle. Yes, humans are a special species. Your God’s purpose in creating humans is a different subject from the history of evolution, and you keep forgetting that evolution did NOT progress solely towards the creation of humans.

This is your confused view of evolution. Humans are the historical endpoint. In still hold to the view God wished to produce humans by evolving them.

dhw: I agree that if God exists he wanted to create ALL of the process of evolution, and that includes ALL of the species that had nothing whatsoever to do with humans. He created or gave free rein to millions of “bushes of life”, not just ours, and they were all self-sufficient.

You cannot disconnect the stepwise development evolving humans from bacteria as one process.

Under "Extinction of earlier forms":

DAVID: As usual you are proposing a God in partial control of the process. It all depends upon how one thinks about God's personality.

dhw: Only partly. It also depends on how you fit your idea of God’s intentions to the actual history of evolution and on what you personally consider to be a reasonable explanation of that history. We have covered the pre-human history in the first part of this post. The second part concerns the history of human evolution, and I find your itsy-bitsy preprogramming or dabbling hard to reconcile with your concept of an all-powerful God who is in total control and only has one goal: H. sapiens.

You are back to a Biblical God. The proper Hebrew interpretation of Genesis is God took eons to produce us. God has the right to choose His method of creation.

Under “Extinctions”:
QUOTES: "The Permian-Triassic mass extinction killed as much as 95 per cent of life, and the very few survivors faced a turbulent world, repeatedly hit by global warming and ocean acidification crises. Two main groups of tetrapods survived, the synapsids and archosaurs, including ancestors of mammals and birds respectively.

"But a strong hint for this sudden origin of warm-bloodedness in both synapsids and archosaurs at exactly the time of the Permian-Triassic mass extinction was found in 2009. Tai Kubo[…] and Professor Benton identified that all medium-sized and large tetrapods switched from sprawling to erect posture right at the Permian-Triassic boundary.

DAVID: Seems quite clear. Of course, we can wonder how God handled this. Did He set up the extinction, or did it happen naturally and He used it to advance evolution? Either or! Note the relationship to the discussion about the size of the food-supplying living bush and the need for calories caused by becoming warm-blooded.

dhw: Noted. This doesn’t explain why your God specially designed millions of extinct food-supplying bushes for millions of extinct cold-blooded and warm-blooded life forms before specially designing the only food-supplying bush and warm-blooded life forms he wanted to design. As for your question about extinctions, if he didn’t set them up, then he was relying on pure chance to shape the course of evolution – i.e. he was RESPONDING to environmental change and not directing it. But random environmental changes would fit in very nicely with the theory that he set up a free-for-all system, in which organisms respond to environmental change without his intervention. However, if he exists, I wouldn’t rule out deliberately dabbled extinction if he got fed up with one bunch of organisms!

Same twisted complaint about the whole process of evolution God chose. You keep implying God should have used direct creation and then deny you implied it. Tell me, if God invented life in the form of bacteria what should come next, if humans are a goal?