Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, December 13, 2022, 08:42 (500 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

DAVID: If God designed them, He felt they were required, because that is what is present.

Required for WHAT? They were not required for what you claim was your God’s one and only goal! You have said so. You have said they were mistakes!

DAVID: 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.

It is YOU who say your God-designed evolution is a mess! Read your own words: “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.” By “naturally” you usually mean without God, but all three of my alternatives include God, and it is only when you make God do it your way that you end with a mess of mistakes, failures and wrong choices! There is no mess if you drop your insistence that his only goal was us and our food; or if he designed all the different life forms, moving from new idea to new idea because he enjoyed creating and was interested in what he created (your own “humanisation” of him in earlier posts); or if instead of designing them himself, he created a mechanism to provide the same ever changing variety, which was even more interesting because the results could be unexpected. No mistakes, no mess, no wrong choices. Only you insist on a mess of mistakes. Our theories do blend in with each other if we regard the dead ends as experiments undertaken in the quest to create a being with thought patterns and emotions like his own (another of your agreements later rescinded). We just have a different way of looking at this alternative: you see it negatively as a succession of failures and mistakes (you actually call them “failed experiments”, which is pejorative), whereas I find the concept of experimentation in the quest for some special creation exciting and admirable. But you prefer to stick to your all-powerful, all-knowing, always-in-control version of a God whose power, knowledge and control lead him to countless mistakes, failures, wrong choices and total mess before he finally comes up with the unexpected result he tried so incompetently to achieve from the very beginning.