Let's study ID (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, September 15, 2021, 12:15 (954 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The continuum of the evolutionary process involves the bush of life constantly expanding into new branches, the vast majority of which had no connection with humans. Hence your perfectly logical statement that extinct life has no role in current time.

DAVID: Thank you.

dhw: Why are you thanking me? If extinct life and food have no role in current life, and had no connection with humans, it is clearly absurd to claim that extinct life and food were part of your God’s one and only goal to create humans and their food (= current life).

DAVID: If God creates evolution it makes perfect sense.

Being all-powerful, wanting only one life form plus food, but designing countless other life forms and foods that have no connection with that one purpose makes perfect sense, but you can’t explain it so I should go and ask God!

DAVID: A free-for-all control of evolution could only accidently produce humans.

dhw: It is possible that every species is indeed “accidental”. That’s one theory. But nothing is “accidental” if you accept the theory that intelligent cells do their own designing. And another alternative is that – if God exists – he created a free-for-all, but left himself the option to dabble when he felt like it.

DAVID: Back to a God not in complete control.

dhw: Yes of course. If God decided NOT to control evolution, he was not in complete control. You have understood the meaning of “free-for-all”.

DAVID: All you wish is a concept of a God who is not in control of His own goals, because they don't seem to have existed in your concept of Him. Thus we are a lucky accident.

I wish nothing. I offer different theories to explain the course of evolution. One, based on one of your guesses, is that his goal was to create life because he enjoys creating and wants something he can watch with interest. That goal would be best served by creating an unpredictable free-for-all (i.e. not controlling every move). Why do you say that is not a goal? We may be a lucky accident, or he might have dabbled, or he might have guessed that eventually the intelligence he had planted in the first cells would later evolve to our level, or he may have wanted to produce such an intelligence and experimented in order to find the right form. All logical “guesses” that fit in with the history of life as we know it. It’s only your “guess” that makes no logical sense and requires your God to explain it.