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

by dhw, Friday, November 06, 2020, 10:32 (1476 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Your usual problem of slicing up evolution into time periods as if there is no continuous relationship from stage to stage. The current huge bush of food is NOW for humans NOW. There were smaller bushes in the PAST for PAST forms.

dhw: [...] at last you’ve accepted that the current bush of food is for now, and the past bushes were for the past, and “extinct life has no role in current time”. So your God did NOT design the ENTIRE bush of life for our food supply – in which case he did not design every extinct life form as part of the goal of designing humans or our food supply. So if humans were his only goal, why do you think he would have directly designed all the extinct species and food supplies? This is the problem you keep trying so desperately to dodge.

DAVID: It is not my dodge but your problem of not accepting the idea that God chose to evolve us from bacteria and created all the branches of life to provide food/energy for all in existence at each specific interval of time while evolving us over a long time.

Your problem is that you can offer no logical connection between your two statements! By evolving you mean directly designing. Once more: bearing in mind that there is no direct connection between the brontosaurus etc. etc. and humans, and there is no direct connection between past food supplies and present food supplies, please explain how EVERY life form in EVERY econiche could have been “part of the goal [= purpose] of evolving [= directly designing] humans”!

dhw: You said that I posited God in charge, which for you means that he designed every life form etc. That is not what I posit – hence the bold. And again you ignore the other premises.

DAVID: [..] We are the endpoint and therefore God's purpose.

dhw: It is your belief that there will be no further speciation, and that may be true. But endpoint is not synonymous with purpose! Death is the endpoint of every life, so does that mean the purpose of every life is to die?

DAVID: A poor comparison. In life we decline into death. Evolution shows a steady design from simple forms to us as the final complexity.

I am challenging your use of endpoint as a synonym for purpose. The possibility that our species may be the last new one (as if you knew what might develop in the next few million years) does not explain how or why every extinct species was designed as “part of the goal of evolving [= directly designing) humans”!

DAVID: You can't accept the position that God decided to evolve us from first life.

dhw: You keep forgetting that according to you, your God directly designed EVERY species from first life. And that includes millions of life forms that had no direct connection to humans. And again you are dodging the problem I keep posing.

DAVID: I keep telling you it is a problem for you that I cannot counter, since the issue is whether God ran evolution or not and if so I believe He designed every advance in complexity.

The issue is why your God would have directly designed every extinct life form and food supply if his only goal was to design one life form and food supply. You can’t “counter” because you know as well as I do that the combination of premises is illogical. Either he didn’t design them all, or he must have had other goals, or he experimented with lots of different forms. Maybe you can think of another alternative that will explain the problem you can’t “counter”.

dhw: The fact that cells “appear” to act intelligently makes it feasible that they DO act intelligently.

DAVID: Same old, same old. Looking intelligent doesn't mean they are intrinsically intelligent.

dhw: It is a theory, and the fact that they appear to act intelligently makes the theory feasible.

DAVID: Feasible is correct. Not explanatory for evolutionary advances.

dhw: If it is feasible that cells are intelligent, and that they are capable of changing their own structures, as they do in minor adaptations, then it is feasible that they can do so in major adaptations and innovations, i.e. in evolutionary advances. Feasibility is the best that one can hope for in any theory relating to a mystery that no one on this Earth has yet been able to solve.

DAVID: The idea that minor adaptation by cells can be extrapolated into the ability to major complex speciation stretches 'feasibility' beyond recognition. It makes for a very slight theory without much weight.

That is of course a matter of opinion, and we can leave it at that. The same may be said of your theory that the very first cells were provided with a 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme for every single change, strategy and natural wonder in the history of life, or your God directly dabbled each one individually in order to be able to dabble humans.