Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, November 26, 2022, 08:42 (726 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: There are all sorts of evolutions: human inventions have failed forms that are discarded; failed concepts in philosophy; failed political parties; etc. All dead ends.

dhw: So now you are telling us that your God, who knew exactly how to design what he wanted, designed life forms that failed to come up with the life forms he wanted to design. Your God kept failing, exactly like us humans! And you think I'm the one who " humanizes" your God!

DAVID: I bring up human examples of dead ends to try and empty your head of worry about dead ends in any form of evolution, and back you bounce to worry about God's form of evolution. All dead ends are of equal importance as examples of how any form evolution works!

So your God specially designed countless forms of life that had no connection with those that he wanted to design, because dead ends are important to show that evolution works by repeatedly failing to design what you want to design. I hope your all-powerful God knows what you are talking about.

DAVID: As for your failed mantra that God makes no sense to me, it is an empty space filler of a contorted accusation. My view of my God makes perfect sense to me.

dhw: Please stop manufacturing straw men. I have never said that God makes no sense to you! It is your theory concerning his purpose and actions that you admit you cannot explain – it "makes sense only to God”.

DAVID: And in that concept, it makes perfect sense to me. Something that evades your understanding.

In what context? Human attempts at design often fail in dead ends, and therefore if your all-powerful God wants to design something, first he has to design dead ends! (Just like humans, but you are not humanizing him, and his failed attempts to design what he wants to design can’t possibly be viewed as experiments.)

DAVID: You totally ignore the point I start with. God, the creator, created everything He thought necessary. Which then leads to accepting everything in God's evolutionary process was required.

dhw: You agree that the dead ends were not necessary for our line plus food. But now you believe your God thought designing dead-end failures was necessary for him to succeed.

DAVID: Again, your failure to comprehend. Whatever has appeared God considered was required.

And according to you, dead ends that had no connection with his purpose were “required”, because that is how human forms of evolution work.

dhw: (referring to the Cambrian): If you believe there is a continuous line of descent from Archaea to us plus food, it makes no sense to state that we plus food are descended from life forms that had no predecessors!

DAVID: A designer can create any gaps He wishes in phenotypes, but not in the biochemistry of living. Only advances in biochemistry permit advances in phenotypes. True evolutionary continuity is in advancing biochemistry, never phenotype.

ALL phenotypes evolve into different phenotypes through changes in the biochemistry.
You seem to be saying that speciation is irrelevant to the concept of common descent.

dhw: Do you or do you not believe that we and our food evolved in a continuous line from Archaea? Or do you believe that we and our food descended from Cambrian life forms which your God designed from scratch without any predecessors?

DAVID: From Archaea!!! Which provided the biochemistry for later forms to join in multicellularity.

So your God's apparent creation of the new Cambrian phenotypes (without predecessors) from which we are descended does not denote a break in evolutionary continuity, because "true" continuity is only defined by the fact that all evolutionary developments involve biochemical changes. And there was me thinking that the basis of evolution was the development of all living forms from earlier ancestral forms.