Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, December 11, 2022, 14:25 (711 days ago) @ David Turell

As you have missed or ignored the point of all my answers, I will quote your comment and answer it again. But first my two “bolds” that summarize the problem of dead ends and the possible solutions.

dhw: But why would an all-powerful, all-knowing God design life forms that had no connection with the only life forms he wanted to design? […] It is YOU who make the dead ends into “mistakes”, by insisting that your God’s only purpose was us and our food. The dead ends would not be “mistakes” if he did not design them..

DAVID: Evolution is a result of God's actions, all the successes and all the dead ends. He chose to evolve us, and you complain about His method. Evolution requires dead ends. Not all approaches will work but many will advance. Your complaint still boils down to "why evolve us when direct creation is so much more efficient". But that isn't what happened and evolving toward a desired goal is what God did. […]

Evolution does not “require” dead ends. It produces them. All your other “evolutions” refer to human activities – political, economic, educational, architectural, technological etc. And yes, things go wrong. According to you, your all-powerful God set out with a single goal – us and our food. Not all his individually designed approaches worked towards achieving his goal. That is why you call them mistakes, failed experiments, wrong choices, thus putting your “all-powerful” God in exactly the same bracket as us humans, though you kid yourself that you don’t “humanize” him! I have suggested two (theistic) ways in which you can remove the whole concept of a fallible God who makes countless “mistakes” on the way to achieving his goal. 1) He did not have one particular goal in mind when he created life, but – in your own words – he “enjoyed” creating (why else would he have done it?), and the enjoyment was enhanced - my contribution – by the pleasure of coming up with new ideas as he went along. By removing the starting point of a single goal, you remove the whole concept of “mistakes”. Humans would have been the last of his new ideas so far, and he would have tinkered with different sorts before deciding which ones he liked best. This also solves the problem of why he designed different humans before designing sapiens directly. 2) He did not design what you call the mistakes, because from the very beginning his goal was to design a free-for-all, the results of which – in your own words – he could watch with interest. And so he designed an entity (the cell) which could reproduce itself and which had the intelligence and plasticity to combine with other cells and – in response to a variety of environments – create the vast variety of forms which have come and gone throughout history. There are no "mistakes". But he left himself the option of dabbling if he felt like it. (That is a point at which we might say 2) links up with 1). My third proposal is that he did set out with the goal of producing a life form that would – in your own words – recognize his work and maybe form a relationship with him, but he needed to experiment in order to create such a being (plus its food). This fits in perfectly with your own proposal, right down to the wording that the dead ends were “failed experiments”. But I don’t see this as in any way demeaning or degrading. An inventor who tries different approaches on the way to achieving a goal commands my total respect, and I'd hesitate to call targeted experiments "mistakes" – but you don’t think so, and you reject this option although you have put it forward yourself.

We can skip the rest of the post, apart from your final comment:

DAVID: Once I insert a purposeful God into the standard history of evolution all sorts of mistakes in evolution turn up. Take God out and what do you think of evolution now. Mistakes, yes or no?

You have hit the proverbial nail on the head. Once you lumber your God with one specific goal and you argue that he individually designed every dead end, and that every dead end was a mistake, you reduce your God to the level of a human bumbler (another of your expressions). None of my proposals “take God out”. And none of them reduce him to the level of a bumbling human being. Mistakes? Not in my first two options. Yes in the third option, if that’s what you like to call them. If you take God out altogether, there are no mistakes because obviously there is no ultimate goal. Organisms survive or fail to survive. Of course if, in the history of my personal evolution, I accidentally step in front of a moving bus, you can I say I made a mistake, but I don’t think that’s quite what you had in mind!