Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 09, 2022, 11:59 (534 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God decides what He has to do. I'm sure you accept that point.

dhw: No, I don’t. If your God exists as first cause, there is no pressure on him to do anything. I assume he does what he wants to do, not what he has to do.

DAVID: Since your God is not goal-oriented (free-for-all) of course He doesn't know what He has to do.

A free-for-all would be goal-oriented, and your God would know precisely how to create it. You are certain that he watches his creations with interest, and so the goal of a free-for-all (which is only one of my alternative theistic explanations for evolution’s history) would be for God to provide himself with something he can watch with interest. A free-for-all would be far more interesting than a predictable puppet show in which he pulls all the strings. In order to create a free-for-all he obviously “has to” create mechanisms which will enable organisms to evolve autonomously – the basic mechanism for which would be the intelligent cell.

dhw [referring to the Cambrian]: You cannot claim that there is a continuous line from the first life forms to us and our ecosystems and at the same time claim that we and our ecosystems are descended from a line of life forms and ecosystems that had no predecessors! [...]

DAVID: The history of evolution is what it is no matter how you distort the interpretation I have. I concentrate on the underlying biochemistry, because there can be no phenotypic forms without it. I'm not dodging. The finding of an enzyme tracing back to Archaea tells us there will be many more. Without those enzymes there is no life. And with established living biochemistry, a designing God can make any forms He wishes with or without predecessors. It is not a dodge. Learn to accept the point.

Since you have totally ignored the response I gave in yesterday’s post, I will have to repeat it. The underlying chemistry is provided by the cells and all their mechanisms. Of course there can be no life and no speciation without the biochemical processes! And of course an all-powerful God can make any forms he wishes. There is no dispute here! The dispute, for the thousandth time, is over your claim that his only wish was to design sapiens and our food, but according to you 1) he used the biochemistry to design countless forms that had no connection with us and our food, and 2) he did not even begin to use the biochemistry in order to design us and our food until he had designed 3.X billion years’ worth of dead ends, because you tell us we and our food are descended not from bacteria but from forms which your God designed from scratch (without predecessors) during the Cambrian. Please stop dodging!

Cambrian explosion: early skeletal form found

QUOTES: This really is a one-in-million discovery.

"In other words, external skeletons probably didn't arise just once but probably evolved several times in multiple different lineages.”

"Even from the little evidence scientists have found, it is clear that tube-shaped animals were popping up before the explosion of animal diversity that once took our life by storm. What triggered their expansion remains an open question…” (dhw's bold)

dhw: A few days ago I pointed out that the quest for fossils was not yet over. Thank you for proving my point and for providing us with another link between pre-explosion and explosion.

DAVID: It is not a link before the Cambrian. It is a Cambrian animal with a new discovery about it.

I chose my words carefully: the link was between pre-explosion and explosion, following the (now bolded) wording in the article. It is humans who split time into units with separate names, but a linking predecessor in the chain of evolution is a predecessor whether it emerged in the late Ediacaran or the early Cambrian.