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

by dhw, Friday, January 21, 2022, 08:10 (819 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Simple answer you refuse to accept: God chose to evolve us from bacteria. And all life needs food which the vast variety of life provides. A full answer to your empty illogical complaint.

dhw: But according to you, he also chose to individually design countless other life forms that had no connection with us, although you say we and our food were his only purpose. Yes, all life needs and always needed food, but that does not mean that all extinct life forms and all extinct foods were part of your God’s one and only goal of evolving (= designing) humans and our food. If an all-powerful God has ONE purpose, why would he devote himself to designing things that have no connection with his purpose? One of your answers:
“I have never tried to explain why God evolves all His creations. It is his choice for His reasons, unknown to us.” By “evolve” you mean design, and we can emphasize the word “all”. Why don’t you leave it at that and stop pretending that you have given me a “full” answer?

DAVID: Humans are God's endpoint of His creation. Everything must be connected if designed in stages. Your bold is purely illogical if we see God uses evolutionary methods for each aspect of creating reality.

Humans are the last species so far. How does that come to mean that all the different stages of the whale were connected to the different stages of hominins and homos, not to mention all the different stages of all the different organisms that preceded all the different organisms that preceded all the different organisms etc. that had no connection with humans? Please accept your own admission that you can’t explain it.

SURVIVAL
dhw: […] please tell us why large groups of scientists believe that adaptations and innovations do not serve the purpose of improving organisms’ chances of survival.

DAVID: Same confusion. Survival does not drive speciation is the issue. What group of scientists say what?

dhw: Why do you keep using the same formula, which of course makes no sense? You’re just playing with language. Survival is the state of continuing to live. It is the RESULT of the changes, not the cause. The cause of the changes which lead to adaptation, innovation and speciation is the quest to improve the organism’s chances of survival. You wrote that this theory is disputed by a large group of trained scientists. And I expressed my surprise, since this seems to me to be so obvious. Whether your God designed autonomous mechanisms, or a computer programme, or popped in to perform operations, the changes would still be for the same purpose: to improve the organism’s chances of survival by adapting to or exploiting new conditions.

DAVID: So you agree, survival is for survivals sake, nothing more.

I don’t know what you mean. Do you or do you not agree that the adaptations and innovations that lead to speciation are designed (by intelligent cells or by God) to improve chances of survival? If you do, and your large number of scientists do, then what are we arguing about? If you want to talk about the purpose of life itself, then we’re on different ground – but you don’t even want to talk about that, except to say that the purpose of every single organism that ever lived was to enable your God to design H. sapiens. Any other purpose, according to you, is “humanizing”, which is only acceptable if we choose human thought patterns and emotions you approve of.

The missing fossils argument
QUOTE: "A time window for the Cambrian explosion briefer than 410,000 years is far too brief for any conceivable naturalistic model for the history of life. It would be far too brief even for the appearance of just one new phylum, let alone 30+ phyla.

Bechley: The most popular attempt to resolve this discrepancy is the so-called “artifact hypothesis,” which proposes that the Cambrian animal phyla had ancestors, but that those ancestors either left no fossil record or have not yet been found, because of the incompleteness of the fossil record.

DAVID: So I might add, without fossils, imagining lost fossils disappears.

Without concrete evidence, theories remain theories. Has anyone found your God's 3.8-billion-year-old programme for all species and natural wonders, or is there a video of him performing operations on whales and camels and small-brained humans? By “naturalistic” I presume the authors are referring to Darwin’s random mutations. If – as I presume – they are telling us that their all-powerful, all-knowing God did it, and there was no “evolution” but simply straight “de novo” design, I’m frankly surprised that it took him so long. There is, of course, an alternative: that he might have designed an intelligent mechanism which was able to exploit the new conditions. 410,000 years is one helluva long time in terms of thousands and thousands of generations of intelligent organisms working out ways of using new conditions.