Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, October 24, 2022, 13:38 (549 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I've explained the dead ends as no longer necessary ecosystems. My God maintains control of evolution, not your humanized God's free-for-all.

dhw: Yet again: no longer necessary for what?

DAVID: Remember? All explained as ecosystems required for a given period/stage of evolution.

This is what I keep telling you, though in more precise terms: the dead-end systems (as opposed to those that led to us and our food) were required/necessary for past organisms, and by definition neither the organisms nor their ecosystems had any connection with current organisms and ecosystems. Therefore it makes no sense to claim that they were all “absolute requirements” for us and our current ecosystems. This is the bit you keep leaving out.

DAVID: Yes, current ecosystems evolved from the past but not from dead ends which are no longer necessary since their usefulness is over as evolution moves on to new stages. Your straw man of dead ends is an irrational manufactured complaint distorting the very meaning of evolution.

You’ve almost grasped the message, except that you will go on using words like “necessary” and “useful”, while leaving out what they were necessary and useful for. So let me repeat yet again: your theory is that ALL past organisms and ecosystems were necessary for the design of sapiens and our food. The dead-end ecosystems, however, were necessary for the dead-end organisms, but NOT for us and our food. The meaning of evolution is: “the process by which living organisms have developed from earlier ancestral forms” (Penguin Dictionary of Science). It most emphatically is NOT the process by which all past forms and ecosystems were specially designed by God as “absolute requirements” in preparation for Homo sapiens and his food.

DAVID: ...Fine. Let's imagine direct creation of humans. They must have food you'll agree. The giant bush of evolution would need to be produced in a Big Bang of immediate creation for the proper supporting ecosystem.

dhw: According to you, that is precisely what he did during the Cambrian Explosion, and you even go so far as to specify that we ourselves and the animals we eat descended from those life forms, which had no predecessors. Your view of the Cambrian completely contradicts your theory that every pre-Cambrian life form and ecosystem was “necessary” to produce us (plus our food).

DAVID: I've fully answered your illogical complaint. A designer God can create gaps is evolutionary progressions.

I agree. A designer God can do whatever he likes. That is why it makes no sense to tell us that from the very beginning, 3.8 thousand million years ago, all he wanted to design was us and our food, and yet he designed countless organisms and ecosystems that had no connection with us and our food, and he didn’t even begin to design us until 500+ million years ago, when he designed our ancestors who had no predecessors!

DAVID: Your pretense is dead ends make my God a bumbling muddled mess. As your God theoretically manages evolution, He produce the same dead ends. All evolution produces dead ends, an intrinsic result.

dhw: I don’t know how many evolutions of life you have experienced. We agree that there were dead ends, but you insist that your God specially designed them, although they had no connection with the only things he wanted to design (us and our food). You can’t explain why he would have done so, and that is how YOU make your God a bumbler. I offer alternative explanations for the dead ends (a free-for-all, experimentation, new ideas), all of which you agree are perfectly logical, but they do not conform to your fixed and inexplicable interpretation of your God’s purpose and method.

DAVID: Yes, I have my God and you have your imagined humanized god.

Your imagined humanized God is such a bungler that you have to admit that your theories would only make sense to him, which means they do not make sense to you.