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

by dhw, Friday, November 20, 2020, 11:54 (1462 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God never planned a direct design. He chose to evolve over time. History shows that.

dhw: You are now deliberately cutting out one of the basic premises that make your theory so illogical. When you talk of “evolution” you mean direct design, because according to you, your God directly designed every innovation, life form, econiche, strategy and natural wonder, as well as every phase in the evolution of humans: you even have him stepping in and fiddling with brains and skulls and pelvises, and if I remember rightly, legs as well (not to mention operating on pre-whale legs to turn them into fins before the creatures even entered the water). It’s all direct design, and the only sop to evolution is that you agree that all these programme changes or direct dabbles were carried out on existing organisms (hence common descent). And so I continue to ask: if God’s plan was to produce H. sapiens (plus food supply) by directly designing stage after stage of pre-humans through to us, why did he first directly design millions of extinct non-human life forms and food supplies that had no connection with us?

DAVID: Because, as history tells us, He started with bacteria and chose to design each stage until we arrived under His designs.

Each “stage” of what? Another dodge! According to you he chose to design every single life form etc. and 99% of them had no direct connection to humans. They were not “stages” to H. sapiens, and they could not have been “part of the goal of evolving [= directly designing] humans.”

DAVID: Nothing is unconnected in the sense that each new stage is more complex and each stage is using the same DNA code.

Again, stage of what? The brontosaurus had no connection with humans, so how could it have been a stage on the way to humans, or “part of the goal” etc.? "Stages" can be applied to hominins and homos on the way to sapiens, but that process is also inexplicable for you, as you admit below.

dhw: Since your God either preprogrammed or dabbled every single life form and every single stage of evolution, why did he preprogramme/dabble all these different homos if he only wanted one? […]

DAVID: I don't know why He used a bush of hominin/homos to reach a final goal of sapiens. I simply follow the rule that God creates history, so it tells us what He did.

And this is the nub of our dispute! You don’t know why he directly designed a bush of hominin/homos, and you don’t know why he directly designed bush after bush of life forms with no connection to humans, but you insist that all the non-humans and all the non-sapiens were part of the goal of designing sapiens.

Under “Human evolution”:
DAVID: This discussion of the earliest possible proto-hominins rules out the theory that tress disappeared and early forms had to learn to walk. These forms were prepared to do both at will. My point is I believe God designed them this way as a transitional form, not a change forced by natural changes to the environment as trees disappeared. Lucy was built the same way million of years later.

And you repeat the point in your second post.
It never seems to occur to you that there are different environments in different places. Do you really think that tree-dwellers never explored the ground? If some remained primarily tree-dwellers, they would not have developed the same degree of bipedalism as those that were forced by a changing environment to leave the trees permanently. This is obvious from the following quote: "Questions remain about whether Ardi had the build for regular upright walking — a clear marker of hominid status — or for primarily moving through trees, with occasional two-legged jaunts on the ground.” And you still “don’t know why he used a bush of hominin/homos to reach a final goal of sapiens.” It doesn’t make sense, does it?

DAVID (under “Theodicy”): God chose to design evolution as a method of creating humans, as history tells us.

Usual omission of the fact that if God exists he chose to design evolution as a method of creating every species that ever lived, and history does not tell us that every single one of them was “part of the goal of evolving [directly designing] humans.”