Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 28, 2022, 16:32 (694 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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.

My discussion of daily weather not in God's control has now morphed in your fertile mind to mean major changes as forests into deserts!! God may or may not have done these events. But they are off the point now bolded above. God, as a master designer, outfitted all new species with the abilities to handle whatever they needed to as conditions changed. When they fell to Raup's 'bad luck' they were failures, in the sense they do not act as a stage to advance complexity. What I am doing is agreeing with you God chose a round-about way to produce humans. And it worked! It seems God knows/knew what He was doing, and never gave a
thought to what you see as problems.

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.

dhw: 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.

We have your picture of a bumbling God because He used the very messy process called evolution. Evolution, as a precise definition consists of moving from one failed experiment to another until a successful one moves to a new level of complexity. Evolution of life is moving from simple to complex. The most complex result, the human brain is here, despite the messy arrangement. God chose to do it this way, despite your objections. I am sure He knew what He was doing. Many years ago, there was an admonition: "keep it simple, stupid". I guess you live by it. God doesn't. He evolves all His different levels of creation, universe from Big Bang, Milky Way gobbling up little galaxies, the Earth from rocks to life, life from Asgard Archaea to us. A definite pattern!