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

by dhw, Monday, October 19, 2020, 14:07 (1494 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: ...you keep forgetting that evolution did NOT progress solely towards the creation of humans.

DAVID: 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.

Humans may be the endpoint, and your God may have wished to produce them by evolving them. That does not mean that evolving means directly design, and you keep ignoring the fact that evolution produced millions of now extinct non-human life forms and econiches which, by your own admission, had nothing whatsoever to do with humans. You are playing the same old trick: you pick on individual aspects of your theory which make sense in isolation, and you ignore the rest. Why would your God directly design the brontosaurus and its econiche (and then wipe 99% of it out) if his one and only goal was to directly design H. sapiens and his food supply? You have said yourself: "extinct life plays no role in current time".

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".

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

And you cannot deny that the same development produced millions of non-human life forms and econiches which had nothing to do with humans, and you keep forgetting that by evolution you mean direct design.

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.

DAVID: 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.

Three complete non sequiturs! No biblical God involved - I believe we evolved, not that we were directly created. I accept that evolution took billions of years. I accept that your God had the right to choose his method of creation. I do not accept that a God whose only purpose was to directly create H. sapiens would have spent eons directly creating millions of other now extinct non-human life forms and econiches that had nothing to do with humans. You know all this, so why do you continue to bring all these irrelevances into the discussion?

DAVID (under “Extinctions”): 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!

dhw: […] 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!

DAVID: 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.

I am not telling God what he should have done! I am telling you that evolution produced millions of extinct non-human life forms which had nothing to do with humans etc. (see above), and your answer has nothing to do with the question of whether your God relied on chance or dabbled the extinctions.

DAVID: Tell me, if God invented life in the form of bacteria what should come next, if humans are a goal?

I have no idea. Nobody can trace that far back for ANY species! Now please tell me why brontosauruses were directly designed if humans were THE goal!

Under “Balance of Nature”:

DAVID: All ecosystems are about food supply, and they have existed and been self-organizing since the start of life. That is why we have the huge bush that now supports a human population currently reaching toward eight billion folks. When I was very young There were only two billion!! Growth exponentially. It is easy to see that God knew all this would happen when we took control of the Earth and the bush of life He provided is thus explained.

Thank you for agreeing that they are self-organizing. How do millions of extinct ecosystems full of extinct life forms explain why we have the huge bush that now supports humans? What role does the brontosaurus play in our human ecosystem? You have already answered, as quoted above: "Extinct life plays no role in current time." You are taking us round in circles.