Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, November 10, 2022, 12:08 (533 days ago) @ David Turell

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

dhw: 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. (…) 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.

DAVID: Once again you have created a God who needs entertainment. There is no other
interpretation possible.

I dislike your terminology, which cheapens the theory. Do you think Beethoven composed his 9th symphony because he was needy and required entertainment? You might consider our world as one colossal work of art, which your God – if he exists – enjoyed creating and which was and is endlessly interesting (those were your own terms). In any case, I’ve answered your objection at the start of this post: a free-for-all is goal-oriented and your God knows exactly what he “has to do” to achieve it.

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: […] I concentrate on the underlying biochemistry, because there can be no phenotypic forms without it. […]

dhw: […] 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…

DAVID: You cannot support that claim! Everything that exists today comes from past forms.

Why do you keep using the same silly dodge? Of course everything that exists today comes from past forms. That is the whole point of the theory of evolution. But you are simply ignoring all the dead ends that did NOT lead to what exists today!

dhw: …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!

DAVID: Insane complaint!! Living biochemistry at the start of life is still used today. Advanced biochemistry in the Ediacaran, designed by God, allowed God to then go forward with new designed forms. A designer can make new forms whenever he wishes.

Assuming God’s existence, there is no dispute over this! All life is based on living biochemistry. You continue to edit out those sections of your theory that make no sense. If your God used living biochemistry to create our ancestors WITHOUT PREDECESSORS during the Cambrian, pre-Cambrian life forms (e.g bacteria) could not have been our ancestors! Hence the dispute bolded above “for the thousandth time”. Please stop dodging!

Cambrian explosion: early skeletal form found

Quote: "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. […]” (dhw's bold)

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID: Ignoring your highlighting of speculation, the Cambrian is a specific geological age: […] "Cambrian Period, earliest time division of the Paleozoic Era, extending from 541 million to 485.4 million years ago."

I know. But time is a continuum. The burning question is not when but if there are links between life forms, as below:

DAVID: Direct article quote: ""Several fortuitous fossils from China have defied the odds and are now providing archeologists with a real glimpse into early lifeforms that lived about 514 million years ago.
The animal appeared 27 million years after the Ediacaran!!!! You always sop up ungrounded Darwinian speculative drivel.

If newly discovered forms from 514 million years ago provide links to forms that appeared 500 million years ago, it’s possible that they in turn linked up with forms that existed 528 or 541 million years ago. ALL these fossils “defy the odds”. But you always “sop up” the ungrounded belief that there should be a complete record of every transition, or else your God created our ancestors from scratch, although paradoxically you also think our ancestors existed before he created them from scratch!