Evolution: fish to land animals transition (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, December 01, 2020, 13:56 (1451 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Under my belief system I find your objections as totally illogical. As God is in charge He does whatever He wishes for whatever His reasons happen to be.

dhw: I totally agree that if God exists, he does or did whatever he wishes or wished. But that does not mean he did what YOU say he did! How can you find my objections to your theory “totally illogical” when you cannot explain how the direct design of millions of extinct life forms and food supplies that had no connection with humans and their food supplies could have been “part of the goal of evolving [= directly designing] humans”?

DAVID: The illogical complaint that you offer about God's using evolution has nothing to do with the fact and I do not and cannot know his reasoning.

I am not complaining about God “using evolution”, but about your theory that he had one goal (humans) and proceeded to directly design anything but humans. Your theory has “nothing to do with the facts” and your inability to find a logical explanation suggests that your theory may be wrong.

DAVID (under “Theodicy”): My thought is God had to evolve us, and was incapable of direct creation without the bush of life preceding us.

So your God was capable of directly designing all the unconnected species and bushes that preceded us, but he “had to” design THEM because he was incapable of directly designing the one he wanted (until he started directly designing the stages that led to the one he wanted.) Oh well, if that fits in with your image of God, so be it, but I still can’t see why he “had to” directly design the brontosaurus et al in order to design the stages that led to H. sapiens. Sorry.

dhw: […] I have proposed a God who did not want direct control, but who allowed free rein because he wanted the ever changing bush which we know from history. But it is also possible that your God was in primary control, and even that humans were his goal, as you propose. However, that leads to the problem you can never solve - why he would directly design all those millions of life forms that had no connection with humans.

DAVID: Same strange complaint as if you think God should have done our creation in some other way than history tells us.

Yet again, I’m not challenging your God but your INTERPRETATION of history, as bolded above, for which you are unable to provide a logical explanation.

dhw: – but I CAN solve it with another theory: that God is a learning God, not a know-all, and so either he experimented, or humans were a late arrival in his thinking. All this is “entertaining all possibilities and having a fair and open discussion” – and you try to block it at every turn with your refusal to face up to the problem just mentioned […].

DAVID: I face up to my problems and come up with solutions that fit my logic.

“I do not and cannot know his reasoning” is not much of a solution.

DAVID: God is fully in charge, He knows exactly what He wishes to accomplish and evolved us over time. Not the wishy-washy semi-deity of your very fertile so-called theistic imagination.

There is nothing “wishy-washy” or “semi” about a God who experiments, or who learns as he goes along, or who watches his creations with interest and who created them for that very purpose.

DAVID: Evolution from bacteria to humans is a continuum. You want to chop it up into unrelated segments when everything present is obviously related to the past.

dhw: Everything present is related to the past through common descent, but you have agreed that evolution branched out in millions of directions.[…]

DAVID: They are all connected to the original bacteria by common descent.

I have just said that (now bolded).

DAVID: They all use the same DNA. Even Darwin drew a tree of life in his famous notebook. I guess as you analyze you are a splitter, not a grouper.

You are deliberately missing the point. There can only be one “continuum” from bacteria to humans, but you insist that every life form on every branch was “part of the goal of evolving humans”, even though 99% had no direct connection with humans. Since you cannot find any logical explanation for this part of your theory but it is fixed in your mind, I suggest we leave it at that.