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

by dhw, Friday, December 31, 2021, 14:00 (1056 days ago) @ David Turell

PART ONE

dhw: Since you refuse to answer my question, I’ll answer it for you. The brain continued to expand until it reached its present size. Obviously it could not go on expanding indefinitely, or we would have finished up with elephant-sized heads on human bodies. And so the already existing process of complexification – we agree that it would have been in use earlier – had to become increasingly efficient in order to meet all new requirements. And it became so efficient that the brain shrank. Please explain precisely what it is that you find so difficult to accept in this theory.

DAVID: Because I believe God designed our brain to do exactly as it did. And God knew the brain He provided was sufficient for all uses.

If God exists, I have no problem with the concept of his designing cells, including brain cells, to do exactly what they do: adapt and/or innovate in response to changing requirements. I do have problems with your rigid belief that he either preprogrammed or personally dabbled every phase of evolution etc., as listed at the end of my post on “Cellular intelligence”.

dhw: You keep telling us that your God designs all “major phenotypic changes” in advance of their being needed. I keep proposing that the changes take place in response to their being needed. I’ll withdraw the expression “itty-bitty” from my question. Please tell us: do you think your God kept popping in every few thousand years to make major adjustments to the less than perfect leggy-flippers he started off with because in future, life and movement in the water was going to become different from when pre-whales first entered it? (The same question applies to all the other changes the animal went through over thousands of years.) As with humans, if he knew what he wanted to design right from the start, why did he have to keep dabbling?

DAVID: The species God designed was not every 'few thousand years'.

I was talking specifically about legs turning into flippers. My apologies, though. I’ll rephrase the question: Do you think your God kept popping in every few million years to make major adjustments to the less than perfect leggy-flippers he started off with because in future, life and movement in the water was going to become different from when pre-whales first entered it?

DAVID: Life evolved over 3.8 billion years, and pre-human to human over 4.5 to five million years. It was obviously God's choice to take all that time. We humans have the time problem you raise, God doesn't being timelessly eternal.

I am not concerned with the length of time! I am challenging your fixed belief that your God either preprogrammed or dabbled every evolutionary change BEFORE the change was necessary.

dhw: […] I don’t understand why an all-powerful God, whose only aim was apparently to design humans plus food, would have had to design whales and humans, plus countless extinct life forms, in “series”, especially since you are convinced that he was capable of designing species without predecessors (e.g. during the Cambrian). NB I am not questioning that these changes took place. I am questioning your theory as to why and how they took place.

DAVID: Why do you question God's choice of action? In my view the Cambrian is no bigger than Lucy.

I am not questioning God’s choice of action (if he exists). In this instance, I am challenging your theory that your all-powerful God deliberately designed every step in every series that led to every species, although the only species he wanted to create was sapiens plus food, and although he has the power – as you believe he does – to create species without predecessors. You seem to be unable to recognize that what you believe to have been God’s actions (specially designing absolutely everything) do not fit in with what you believe to have been your God’s one and only purpose (to design sapiens plus food).