Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, September 05, 2022, 12:41 (808 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You wrote: “to believers it doesn’t matter if we can’t understand God’s personal reasons.” […] if God exists, by all means let us be thankful for the wonderful things he has created, but why must we accept illogical theories about why and how he created them, and why must we turn a blind eye to the horrors that he has also created? Who made up such silly rules?

DAVID: It is your problem, not mine. You always emphasize the horrible, while it is present it is a minuscule portion of all daily events.

1) Some believers kill those who can’t understand what they consider to be God’s “personal reasons”. Why is that not a problem for you?

2) The problem of theodicy is why an all-good God would have created bad. You do not solve the problem by pretending that disease, flood, famine, natural catastrophes etc. are “a minuscule portion of daily events”, bearing in mind that all these horrors also took place long before sapiens became able to interfere with Nature.

dhw: […] The massive diversity of life (animal and vegetable) over the last 3.8 billion years is what provided/provides the food supply for those within each and every ecosystem extinct and extant. That does not mean that every single extinct form of life and every single ecosystem was an “absolute requirement” in preparation for H. sapiens and our food.

DAVID: The New Zealand story refutes you.

No it doesn’t. See “More miscellany”.

dhw: The theory that H. sapiens descended from species that had no precursors (Cambrian) destroys the theory that your God’s purpose from the very beginning was to design H. sapiens.

DAVID: dhw please look at your own words, now in red:

dhw: […] If God exists, I doubt if anyone would argue that he did not do what he wished to do. If we look on the history of life and interpret it as a free-for-all, then we would argue that he wished to create a free-for-all. The fact that an interpretation differs from your own interpretation does not automatically mean that it is wrong.

DAVID: The Cambrian is God doing His designing job as He wishes. Your words agree!! The free-for-all is the fixed pattern of ecosystems all over the world. See New Zealand entry today.

Your theory that we are descended from species your God designed without precursors makes nonsense of the theory that we were his goal from the very beginning, if all he designed pre-Cambrian were species that did NOT lead to us! (But elsewhere, you agree that we descended from bacteria!) My "red" suggests that his wish may not have been what you wish he wished! The Cambrian remains a mystery, but gaps in the fossil record do not necessarily mean that there were no precursors (new fossil finds have blurred some of the apparent borderlines between Ediacaran and Cambrian) or that a sudden major change in the environment (e.g. an increase in oxygen) could not have produced sudden major changes resulting in speciation. See "More miscellany”. Thank you for acknowledging that ecosystems all over the world and throughout the history of life are a free-for-all. The exact opposite of your theory that every single one throughout 3.8 billion years was an “absolute requirement” in preparation for us and our food.

Transferred from “More miscellany”:

DAVID: The God I envision has a direct vision for His evolutionary processes and pursues them very directly and with purpose.

dhw: I agree, and all my alternative theories have him doing just that. Only your theories have him using evolutionary processes to pursue his purpose indirectly, and only your theories make no sense to you or to me. (They “make sense only to God.”)

DAVID: Repeated fully answered in the past posts.

Never answered. Once more, please tell us which of your theories “make sense only to God”, i.e. not to you.

DAVID: What emotions He might have similar to ours do not change His purposeful creations. They are a side issue which do not affect His pursuit of purpose.

dhw: We are talking about his purpose, and I suggest that whatever human emotions he might have would be the driving force behind his creativity.

DAVID: All human guesses of God's possible personal reactions to His creations.

Wrong. They are guesses/proposals concerning his reasons for creating his creations. And each of them is based on your own belief that he feels these emotions. Even you must recognize how daft it is to believe that from the very beginning your God wanted to design humans, but only after he had designed them did he realize that he wanted them to recognize him, admire his work and have a relationship with him! Or he enjoyed creating, but didn’t realize he enjoyed it until he’d done it...over and over again a few million times.

DAVID: I'll remind God is a person like no other person. I view Him as creating without emotions driving His creations. Your humanized God is just the opposite.

We would all agree that if he exists, he is like no other person, but he can hardly be a person without having personal attributes. See above for the daftness of your belief that whatever his human thought patterns might be, they have played no part in his reason for creating life, including humans.