Return to David's theory of evolution PART TWO (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, December 17, 2021, 15:06 (860 days ago) @ David Turell

PART TWO
DAVID: My God had to have this system of life as the only one that will work at the speeds necessary.

dhw: There you are: he “had to”. Your all-powerful, all-knowing God was compelled by conditions of his own making to create a system with errors which he did not want, and tried – often unsuccessfully – to correct.

DAVID: Don't you understand the phrase: "the only one that will work" implies that is all there is to pick from. Nothing else will work.

I understand it. I just don’t believe that an all-powerful God is incapable of designing a system that doesn’t make errors, or that he is incapable of correcting some of the errors. And I propose that the system he designed was the system he WANTED to design.

DAVID: So, yes, this is what He wanted. But not from the weak humanized God you always imply. […]

dhw: It is you who make him weak! I propose that his powers (if he exists) are unlimited, and the system with its capacity for all life forms from molecules upwards to do their own thing was what he WANTED to create, and not what he “had to” create.

DAVID: Invent the God you need to avoid a belief in God. Yours is illogically very human, not God-like.

How can a theory about an all-powerful God who knows exactly what he wants and proceeds to design it be an attempt to avoid a belief in God? Why is it more human for your God to design exactly what he wanted to design than for him to try – sometimes in vain – to correct the errors he could not avoid in the system he had designed?

DAVID: Why should He be at all like any human you know?

dhw: […] I find it totally logical that if God exists as first cause, whatever he creates will reflect some aspect of himself, since it never existed until he thought of it. Do you really think your God has no idea what it means to love, hate, enjoy, be bored, be sad, be happy? Are we that much more advanced than he is? If he exists.

DAVID: We see very different Gods. Of course He knows all of our emotions.

dhw: Then we see the same God, since if he exists, according to you only he could have created them!

DAVID: He created us so we could have emotions, all of them.

So how does that come to mean we don’t have thought patterns, emotions and logic similar to his?

DAVID: Since God is so powerful, our mimicking can only be in a small degree.

dhw: Yes, yes, we are minuscule compared to his almightiness. But that still leaves plenty of room for him to want a free-for-all, or to experiment, or to have new ideas as he goes along, and above all in the context of our discussion, it leaves plenty of room for him to act logically and, if he has a single purpose, to fulfil it without all the diversions you impose on him (i.e. God’s only purpose was to design H. sapiens plus food, and therefore he designed the brontosaurus and the weaverbird’s nest, neither of which had/has any connection to humans.)

DAVID: Evolution required past stages, past ecosystems as part of God's choice of method of creation. Without ecosystems for food we wouldn't be here.

Nor would all the other life forms that had/have no connection with humans, so why did he design them if the only species he wanted to design were us and our food? Stop dodging!

DAVID: Your constantly repeated illogical negative mantra fills space and reminds me of Joe Goebel's belief. Repeating a lie often enough becomes the truth.

I’m sorry, but there are no lies here. Your mantra is the illogical premise I have questioned in bold and for which you admit you can find no logical explanation. I have proposed alternative scenarios which you agree are logical. There is no “lying”.

DAVID: Adler used the appearance of humans as a proof of God. Are you afraid of read his opinions as developed? No, you must protect your rigidity.

I have a thousand times accepted the logic of your argument and Adler’s that humans (and indeed all other life forms) are so complex that they must have been designed, and design requires a designer. I have other reasons for my agnosticism, but you know perfectly well that in our discussions on evolution I am, for the sake of argument, speculating on your God’s motives and methods, not in his existence! So please stop dodging!

DAVID: […] In the other thread you have shown you have no idea of ID's philosophic approach to purposely not using any sniff of religion or God in how they present design as a sole argument.

See the other thread for your usual avoidance of the question I asked.