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

by dhw, Monday, March 28, 2022, 10:35 (969 days ago) @ David Turell

You cannot explain why an all-powerful God with a single purpose (humans plus food) should decide first to design countless life forms and foods which have no connection with his single purpose. Please stop pretending that you can’t see the illogicality although you admit you can’t find an explanation.

DAVID: […] My guesses about God. which you love to quote. have no basis in fact! They are not related to my conclusion about God desiring humans.

dhw: Everything I quote from you is a “guess”, including the above theory about God’s one and only purpose and method of achieving it. You asked me why we are here, and I repeated your own humanizing theory. [He wants us to admire his work and to have a relationship with him.] But just to set the record straight, I don’t have a problem with God desiring humans (plus food). However if, as you believe, he specially designed all the other species not connected with humans and or food, he must have “desired” them too, so humans could not have been his only purpose. Alternatively, he may have been experimenting, or getting new ideas as he went along, which you agree offers a logical explanation, but that is too humanizing for your God, although you agree he probably has thought patterns and emotions like ours.

DAVID: You either won't see or can't see our differences in how we each think about God. Once again you attempt to equilibrate or views as if mine is human as yours. Distinctly dissimilar.

1)Do you or do you not agree that if your theory is correct, he must have wanted to design all the life forms and foods that had no connection with humans?

2)Your guesses – wanting our admiration, wanting a relationship - are just as “human” as wanting to create something interesting for himself, and in any case, you agree that he enjoys creating and is interested in what he creates.

The theories concerning experimentation and new ideas are offered only as an explanation for the creation of all the unconnected species and foods. However, you prefer to believe that your God “makes sense only to Himself”, and we should simply accept the illogicality of your theory.

God's choice of war over peace

DAVID: Again, fully answered above. I have no limits on God's abilities, but cannot answer your wild wishes for my God that you invent for Him as a straw man tactic.

dhw: Why do you insist that your all-powerful God could not possibly have created a Garden of Eden even if he’d wanted to? […] it is perfectly possible even within the current system for life forms to live in peace and cooperation with one another, and to find foods that do not involve killing and eating other sentient life forms?

DAVID: It is not 'perfectly possible in this current system'. That is pure pipe dream. show me how in a Wilson living system.

We have countless examples of peaceful cooperation in this current system, the most obvious one being the harmonious manner in which our own cell communities harmonize with one another most of the time. I gave symbiosis as another example. Do you know of any herbivore that deliberately kills other animals and eats them? I don’t see why you can’t imagine an earthly paradise, BUT as you once observed, it could be rather boring. At the time, you meant boring for humans, but the world existed long before we did. My suggestion is that it would be boring for God, if he exists.

DAVID: […] And now cell committees thought to produce humans. How intelligent of them!

dhw: Evolution is the history of single cells combining and cooperating to form new and increasingly complex communities. According to you - who believe in common descent apart from when you don’t (the Cambrian) – your God either preprogrammed every combination 3.8 billion years ago, or he kept dabbling one by one with each individual cell community to create new combinations. A theistic alternative is that he gave them the intelligence to do their own designing (though he could always dabble if he wanted to), with the result that each new organ and organism presents us with a shining example of peaceful cooperation.

DAVID: Back to your invented theism where somehow intense design is not needed. Cells cannot make irreducibly complex designs on their own. They must be given equivalent instructions to follow.

QUOTE: “Cells are built to evolve; they have the ability to alter their hereditary characteristics rapidly through well-described natural genetic engineering and epigenetic processes as well as by cell-mergers. Evolutionary novelty arises from the production of new cell and multicellular structures as a result of cellular self-modification functions and cell fusions.” (James A Shapiro)
I would add the possibility that there is a God who designed this ability. This theism is no more and no less “invented” than your own 3.8-billion-year-old book of instructions for the whole of life’s history, or your vision of God operating over and over again on existing cell communities to restructure them into new cell communities, quite apart from his giving endless lessons to every species that performs a natural wonder such as a complicated nest, clever camouflage, and migration to a warm spot 10,000 miles away.