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

by David Turell , Friday, July 01, 2022, 16:08 (874 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

The bold is your unreasonably distorted interpretation of how I view God. What God created and how He did it were for His own reasons, which I do not have to understand to accept them. Obviously, I try to interpret them.

dhw: 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 bold is only partially correct and you knowingly ignore the incorrect part. I conceded your God theories logically fit a very humanized form of a God.

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.

dhw: 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?

What you have obviously ignored yet again, is the obvious point: in all of evolutionary history there is no other gap like the Cambrian. All you do is theorize bloviated generations when how speciation happens is not known, and only you raise that issue desperately to save your Darwinian prejudices.

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.

dhw: 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!

What God does always makes sense to Him and to me, because God always knows what He is doing.

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!!!

dhw: 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.

And they also make perfect sense to me if not to you. I repeat the obvious. You obviously do not know how to think about God as I do. This gap has driven our discussions for years.