Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, December 15, 2022, 08:54 (707 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Everything you and I have written depends on which version of God you choose. Adler and I see God with definite purpose to produce humans. Your imagined God is all over the place, not sure where He is actually going with an endpoint up for grabs.

You specify over and over again that your imagined God’s one and only purpose was to produce humans plus food. In pursuing this goal, YOU say: “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.” That = going all over the place. “Endpoint” is not identical to “purpose”, and with a few hundred (thousand?) million years to go, it’s still up for grabs.

I present three imaginings: 1) is your own version: God’s purpose is to produce humans plus food, and to achieve this, he conducts experiments. You agree, but describe his experiments as mistakes, failures, wrong choices, and incomprehensibly insist that his experiments are not experiments. 2) a compromise: God enjoys creating (you were once certain that this was true), and has new ideas as he proceeds. Humans plus food therefore become a purpose late on in the process. No mistakes, failures, mess etc. 3) God’s enjoyment is enhanced by creating a free-for-all which provides unexpected results (though he may dabble). There are no mistakes, failures, wrong choices in any of my versions apart from the first if that is how you wish to regard targeted experimentation. Each version is purposeful, and the only messy one is yours.

DAVID: I'll repeat, evolving toward any goal is messy, by definition.

Evolution: “the process by which living organisms have developed from earlier ancestral forms.” Yes or no? Extinction (“dead ends”) is an historical fact, but it only becomes “messy” if you try to define evolution as a messy process in which an all-powerful God designs every organism with one single goal in mind, although 99% of his designs are mistakes.