Return to David's theory of evolution PARTS 1 & 2 (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, January 11, 2022, 08:03 (1045 days ago) @ David Turell

PART ONE

DAVID: Complexification is a preparation to handle future use, supplied in the newly enlarged brain by God, long before all the current brain uses were needed or required.

dhw: What do you mean by “complexificaton is a preparation”? Complexification is the process, and each complexification is a new product of the process, which takes place in RESPONSE to new requirements. We have agreed that the ABILITY to complexify must have been present in earlier brains as well, and of course the ability – or what you earlier called the mechanism – was present before it was called upon to meet new requirements.

DAVID: Exactly: the bold is correct. The complexification is there in advance to handle new uses.

The bold says that each complexification takes place IN RESPONSE, not in advance. It is the ABILITY to complexify, or the MECHANISM for complexification which is there in advance. Why are you trying to wriggle out of your agreement with what, after all, seems blindingly obvious?

dhw: You tried to use the brain as an example of how your God designed new organs and organisms in anticipation of the conditions that required or allowed them. The article on “Oxygen” that we discussed under “More miscellany” is another instance in which you appear to agree that the change in conditions comes first, but then you try to wriggle out of it.

DAVID: No wiggle. Environmental/changed conditions allow new advances. More oxygen allowed God to now design Cambrians.

So even in your own theistic scenario, the oxygen comes first and “now” God designs the new species. He does not design them in anticipation of the oxygen arriving.

DAVID: Not worth doing until His complex quantum-process-using photosynthesis developed enough oxygen.

Absolutely crazy to design an animal that needs oxygen if the oxygen isn’t there. I have no objection to your logic if you say that God first created the new conditions and then designed the new species. Whether one believes that he deliberately designed every single environmental change, local and global, that required or allowed every single evolutionary change is another matter. It is your idea of speciation in anticipation of new conditions that I have been objecting to. And yet once again, you try to wriggle out of your agreement:

DAVID: New conditions allow new changes to happen. God designs in advance for them. [dhw’s bold]

dhw: You say you cannot design an organism dependent on new conditions (oxygen) if the new conditions oxygen) aren’t already present, so what is it that God designs in advance? Did oxygen-breathing animals appear before there was oxygen? Once more, what exists in advance can only be the MECHANISM which makes new changes when conditions require or allow them – not in advance of the change in conditions.

DAVID: The MECHANISM is God working is stepwise evolutionary fashion!

If you want to call your God a mechanism, that’s up to you. It’s true that one of the two methods you allow him is a 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme which switches itself on at every pre-planned moment to carry out the requisite changes to the cells, but even then, it would only be switched on IN RESPONSE to new conditions and not before they existed. And the same applies to his dabbling: not much point in dabbling with the cells to create a new species BEFORE the right conditions exist, is there? My proposal has him giving the cells the intelligence to RESPOND to new conditions by changing themselves. In all our theories, speciation takes place in RESPONSE to new conditions, and not beforehand.

dhw: PART TWO simply repeats points already dealt with under “Cellular Intelligence” concerning ecosystems, and “slicing and dicing”, as attempts to dodge the question of why your God would design countless life forms that had no connection with humans plus food, if his one and only purpose was to design humans plus food.

DAVID: You recognize the need for a huge bush of food and then deny it totally illogically.

You simply refuse to put the pieces together. All organisms need food. What I deny is your theory that your God only wanted to design humans plus our food, and therefore designed 3.X billion years’ worth of life forms and foods, the majority of which had no connection with humans. THAT is what is illogical, you admit it, can’t explain it, and so you continue to edit out all the parts of your theory that make it illogical!

DAVID: So God is still not allowed to create us from bacteria in a stepwise fashion creating a huge bush of ecosystems for food?

If God exists, he created us (or allowed his invention to create us) plus every other life form and food, extant and extinct, in a stepwise fashion from bacteria! The huge bush of ecosystems provided food for every life form, extant and extinct. That does not mean that every life form extant and extinct and every branch of every bush that existed and perished for 3.X billion years was “PART OF THE GOAL OF EVOLVING [DESIGNING] HUMANS” AND THEIR FOOD! Please stop editing out the illogical bits of your theory and then pretending it’s logical!