Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, December 28, 2022, 11:59 (694 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

DAVID: 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.

Once more you are editing your theory. You have agreed that 99% of your God’s special designs (organisms and ecosystems) were NOT necessary for the design of his one and only goal: humans and our food. I have called them "dead ends", and you have called them “mistakes”, “failed experiments”, “wrong choices” and part of the mess for which he is responsible. You have stated that your God does not control local climate and environmental changes such as those that lead to forests turning into deserts (hardly "daily" or "yearly"), which means that he was relying on luck to provide him with an environment that would be suitable for us and our food. I don’t know why you are now claiming that all this is a distortion.

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.

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

It is YOU who explicitly used the term “failed experiments”, and it is perfectly normal to conduct experiments in order to achieve a precise goal. Again it was you who used human forms of “evolution” to illustrate the point (our various political, economic, educational, technological “evolutions” are all riddled with “failed experiments” despite their precise goals.) Why are you now going back over old ground when you have already left it behind? You wrote: “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.” It is because you give him a precise goal that you have to call his failed experiments “mistakes”. That is the essence of the experimentation theory you have embraced, and it offers one logical explanation of life’s messy history.