Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, December 12, 2022, 17:36 (710 days ago) @ dhw

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. […]

dhw: Evolution does not “require” dead ends. It produces them.

DAVID: Exactly!!! To have any advance, organisms must fail!! That is the exact sense of my use of the word 'required'.

dhw: It is the organisms that succeed in adapting themselves or in producing successful innovations that “advance”. The dead ends are the ones that die off without any successors. In your theory, they are your God’s failures or “mistakes”, because he produced them although they were never “required” for the strands of evolution that led to us and our food. But according to you, they were required because your all-powerful, all-knowing God had to design things that were not required because otherwise he couldn't design things that were required.

If God designed them, He felt they were required, because that is what is present. What you are really saying is evolution is an inefficient, messy, cumbersome way to reach a goal. When
God does it, it is all wrong. But, when it is seen as occurring naturally, it suddenly is all OK. You can't have it both ways. Your argument against God-designed evolution is completely wrong.

DAVID: Once God appears, He is responsible for all the messy aspects of evolution. Yes, He is. The whole of evolution is a messy process of successes and failures. And the result, us, is a most unexpected result.

dhw: My God (if he exists), who systematically experiments, or enjoys creating new things as new ideas come to him, or who has created an autonomous mechanism which will constantly produce “unexpected” results (far more interesting than results already known beforehand) is called bumblingly human. Whereas your God starts out with only one purpose, creates a total mess, and after he has made mistake after mistake with his “failures” and wrong choices, the one thing he had in mind unexpectedly emerges from the mess. But apparently he is all-powerful, always in control, and there is nothing bumbling about his mess of failures and successes, which are just like all human-made evolutions although you do not humanize him.

You've just repeated your distortion. See above