Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, December 27, 2022, 16:00 (695 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Now you have jumped to permanent local changes of such a magnitude God might have had a role in creating. I thought we were discussing local weather and local climate. I can point to ice ages where God may have had a role.

dhw: I have not jumped. I gave you the example of desert to forest right from the start, you agreed that your God would have played no role in the change, and you agreed that species appear locally and that your God continued “speciation which responds with forms adapted to new conditions.”(My bold). If your God responds to new conditions which he did not control, he can hardly be said to have been in tight control of evolution.

DAVID: Even if limited to creating new evolved forms, a designing God is in tight control. It doesn't matter how conditions change, God, with his powers of design, can design the required new forms.

dhw: I think I’ve understood your new theory. He started out with the desire to create a being like himself, couldn’t control the environment, and so kept on experimenting with different life forms, the vast majority of which were mistakes, failed experiments, wrong choices, until at last luck created the conditions under which he was able to start experimenting with whatever life forms had been lucky enough to survive. Then eventually, even though he continued to mess things up with further failed experiments, he was able to put all the bits and pieces together to claim success.

You keep twisting my view of evolution into a total distortion and wasteland. I view God as having a clear vison of where He was going and how to get there. You are distracted by my comment that local weather, daily, yearly, is not under God's tight control. But not to matter, God designed for whatever was needed immediately or in the future. In considering the very necessary ecosystems, which are always minimized in your mind, as organisms came and went, the ecosystems were always there for food support, and also came and went. That is the nature of evolution. Messy, but very efficient in reaching fully functional surviving complex organisms like us.

DAVID: It is your observation God took a cumbersome way to produced us, by evolution rather than directly. The entire discussion supports that observation. And it can now end. God does it His way.

dhw: Let’s use your vocabulary. The entire discussion supports your observation that your God is responsible for all the “mistakes, “failed experiments”, and “messy aspects” of evolution.

DAVID: Yes, God chose to evolve us through that messy process.

dhw: Thank you for confirming your faith in the experimentation theory. As I have explained before, it is my least favoured of the three I’ve proposed, because it makes him rather weak and messy, but we needn’t go into the details again.

Let's not. Evolution is always designing and testing. However, God was not experimenting. He had precise goals.