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

by dhw, Tuesday, March 29, 2022, 11:04 (757 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: Please stop pretending that you can’t see the illogicality although you admit you can’t find an explanation.

DAVID: I'm not pretending. It's simple. God decided to evolve us from bacteria.

But he also decided – according to you – to evolve (= design) every other life form from bacteria, including all those unconnected with us and our food), which makes non-sense of your claim that we and our food were his sole purpose from the beginning.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Mine are only guesses from our human standpoint and do not describe or agree to your desires for a god who creates for his interest or entertainment.

Wanting admiration and a relationship is just as “human” as wanting to create something interesting. I don’t “desire “ such a god, but if God exists, I seek a logical explanation for the history of life as we know it in the context of his possible purposes, methods and nature.

DAVID (transferred from “More miscellany”): ... it is very possible He just does it without any emotions or feelings about it. Any other approach is humanizing. […]

Yes, it is possible that the God you described as kind, and who tries to rectify the mistakes made by the system he designed, does so with no feelings. But I find it hard to imagine your first cause God creating thought patterns and emotions which he knows absolutely nothing about.

dhw:[…] However, you prefer to believe that your God “makes sense only to Himself”, and we should simply accept the illogicality of your theory.

DAVID: If that is my exact quote, it means God understands what He does is innately logical to Him and may or may not be logical for us.

It is an exact quote, and it fits in perfectly with your repeated admission that you can’t explain your theory and so I should go and ask God for his reasons.

God's choice of war over peace

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.

dhw: 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[…] My suggestion is that it would be boring for God, if he exists.

DAVID: As usual, a non-answer for your pipedream. No Wilson life system described. and final straw, your poor god hates being bored!

I have described a system in which all life forms live at peace with one another, cooperating instead of fighting and killing. My view is that if an all-powerful God had wanted to design a Garden of Eden, he would have done so. And so I propose that he did not want such a paradise, but wanted the system we actually have. Your view seems to be that he was incapable of designing such a system, tried to rectify faults (e.g the ravages caused by the viruses he had designed), but sometimes couldn’t and so left it to humans to do what he couldn’t do. And yet he's all-powerful.

DAVID: Cells cannot make irreducibly complex designs on their own. They must be given equivalent instructions to follow.

dhw: 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)

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Once again you have inflated Shapiro. His proposed theory is taken from self-sufficient free- living bacteria who must have those abilities to adapt to survive. […]

I don’t know why you continue to belittle him, as if he would have constructed his theory without taking into account the findings of other scientists’ research. But do please tell me why my theistic theory is more “invented” than your own, as summarized above.