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

by dhw, Saturday, July 16, 2022, 08:11 (859 days ago) @ David Turell

Horizontal gene transfer at all levels
DAVID: HGT is a major evolutionary mechanism and as I view God's controls, a way He can step in for a 'dabble'.

dhw: As I view it, this would be a way in which your God could have organized a free-for-all, through which autonomous cells would have created the vast variety of life forms extant and extinct that constitute the history of life on Earth.

DAVID: Free-for-alls do not show the directionality evolution shows.

What “directionality”? Evolution shows us a bush of life that branched out in countless directions, with the vast majority of the branches having died out and having played “no role in current time”. You want to focus on one single “direction” (sapiens plus food) and ignore all the rest that had no connection with sapiens plus food.

dhw: […] our disagreement is not over God the designer, but over your view of how and why he might have designed speciation. And there is no more “proof” of his 3.8-billion-year-old book of instructions than there is of his personal intervention. So please stop pretending that your theistic theory has more “factual support” than mine.

DAVID: We both know God is not proven, which allows our imaginations to play. I don't accept your 'play' form.

dhw: You don’t accept any of my logical alternative theistic theories of evolution because you stick rigidly to the only one which doesn’t make sense to you.

DAVID: God always makes sense to me, but yours doesn't.

We are not talking about “God” but about your theories concerning your God’s motives and methods. What did you mean when you told us that your theories “made sense only to God” if you did NOT mean they didn’t make sense to you?

End of Ordovician
QUOTE: “'When you shift from greenhouse conditions to ice house conditions, there are going to be major changes in ocean circulation patterns,” Mitchell says.

DAVID: all extinctions changed the course of evolution, but life never was destroyed and new forms charged on as if nothing ever happened.

dhw: Changing the course of evolution over and over again seems like an odd procedure for “a very organized purposeful God who knows exactly how to proceed without deviations.”

DAVID: Your logic is not God's as you criticize His evolutionary actions once again.

I am not criticizing God! I am criticizing your illogical theory!

DAVID: Evolution is a staged process, in which a degree of complexity is developed at each stage. Stages can be ended when the requirements of an advance are met, then forms can be discarded, and new ones designed based on new available underlying biochemistry.

So didn’t your God know about the “available underlying biochemistry” when apparently he started out on his one and only mission to design sapiens plus food? Why did he have to design (as an “absolute requirement”) and then “discard” all the countless life forms that had no connection with sapiens plus food? If the course of evolution changed over and over again, with the extinction of vast numbers of species that had been individually designed by your God and had no connection with sapiens plus food, how does this denote that your God proceeded to design sapiens plus food “without deviations”? I know your answer to all these questions: it all “makes sense only to God.”

Older time line for humans
DAVID: this seems like a more reasonable timeline for our development. But in contrast to whales our evolution is like a speedboat. They look fifteen million years or more.

dhw: One can’t help wondering why your all-powerful God devoted so much of his creative genius to all the different stages of human and whale evolution although apparently all he wanted was sapiens (plus food) and he was perfectly capable of designing new species without any precursors at all (see your Cambrian theory). But again, this is part of the combination of theories which “makes sense only to God”.

DAVID: Why shouldn't it make sense to God if not to you?

I don’t understand your question. You say your theory “makes sense only to God”. It certainly doesn’t make sense to me, and your statement can only mean that it doesn’t make sense to you either. Of course you are welcome to believe in a theory which doesn’t make sense to you, but that really doesn’t lend much credence to the theory, does it?