Return to David's theory of evolution PART 2 (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, July 01, 2022, 10:49 (874 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You accept God evolved us, but then try to do away with all the earlier creature stages that lead stepwise to us. In view of God as designer, He decided all those steps were required, and it makes sense to Him.

If God exists, I accept that God evolved us and I accept that there were earlier creatures that led stepwise to us! But (a) YOU try to “do away with” all the earlier stages that did NOT lead stepwise to us (by ignoring them), and when I remind you about them, you insist that your God designed them individually as an “absolute requirement” for us and our food although they had no connection with us and our food. And (b) when I remind you of your belief that your God created species with no precursors, and ask why in that case he designed us in stages - the only species you say he wanted to design – you admit that it makes no sense to you either. So it WOULD make sense to see if your God might have had a different purpose for creating life from the one you impose on him, or might have had logical reasons for achieving that purpose in the manner you impose on him. Hence my various alternatives, which you agree fit in logically with the history of life as we know it.

The Cambrian Gap

dhw: Nobody knows the cause, but increased oxygen is one theory concerning the conditions which allowed all the changes. I have devoted several entries suggesting that the time needed for speciation depends on generations and not on the calendar, and that it is not unreasonable to suppose that intelligent cell communities (as opposed to random mutations) might produce the necessary innovations within the 30,000 or so generations that would have succeeded one another over 410,000 years.

DAVID: Why ignore my comparison with all other known gaps? What does 30,000 theoretical generations mean among evolution facts? You are scrambling to protect your Darwinist theories.

I have not ignored it. I have pointed out that “gaps” are caused by the fact that conditions remain the same for long periods of “stasis”, and the comparatively short period of time covered by the Cambrian would be sufficient for 30,000 or so generations of intelligent organisms to design new responses to the new conditions. The number is theoretical -I don’t mind how many generations you think would fill that period - but do you really believe that the generations themselves are theoretical? That there weren’t generations after generations of organisms during the 410,000 years? Of course the intelligent cell is theoretical, but no more so than your unknown and unknowable sourceless, immaterial mind preprogramming every change 3.8 billion years ago, or popping in to perform countless psychokinetic operations on existing organisms, or psychokinetically conjuring up new ones from scratch.

dhw: If only you would stop pretending that your combined theories are facts, and you would acknowledge that if they "make sense only to God", then they do not make sense to you, we could put a stop to the repetition and all your evasions.

DAVID: More psychoanalysis.

There is no psychoanalysis involved. Your theories are not facts, and since you say they “make sense only to God”, quite clearly they do not make sense to you!

DAVID: It all makes sense to me as I think about God, and you do not think about Him in the same way. The design we see requires a designer, who is 'unknown and unknowable' and must be a 'sourceless, eternal, superintelligent being' logically!!!

Back you go to the question of God’s existence, but all the theories of evolution we have discussed ACCEPT the possible existence of your God, and it is your interpretation of his goal and methods that do not make sense to you. In this context, how you “think about God” is that God only wanted to design humans plus food, and so he designed countless organisms that had no connection with humans plus food, and he designed humans in stages although he could have designed us without any precursors. In both cases, you consider these combinations of theories to be senseless, but you happen to know that they make sense to God.