Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, February 03, 2023, 12:10 (446 days ago) @ David Turell

Raup’s failure rate

DAVID: I was commenting at the human level. God always knows what will work and what will fail.

dhw: You were replying to a comment on your God’s failures. I didn’t know humans had learned how to design species! And why would he [misprint corrected] design species after species, knowing that 99% of them would be mistakes? Any ideas?

DAVID: You keep divorcing yourself from the discussion point that God chose to evolve us. Of course, He would know how evolution worked with its 99% loss rate.
And:
DAVID: You are thinking of a human God who doesn't know the future. A real God understands completely what and why he is doing it. He knows 99% won't survive.

You “keep divorcing yourself” from every question I ask. WHY would he design species after species if he already knew that 99% of them would be mistakes - failed experiments, dead ends that would NOT lead to the fulfilment of what you believe to have been his one and only purpose? (As you agreed earlier, "not surviving" is not synonymous with mistakes and failed experiments.) You make him look a fool, and it’s no answer to say that he knows what he’s doing. That makes him even more of a fool. You just cannot accept the possibility that your interpretation of his motives and methods might be wrong!

dhw: […] yet again, please tell me why your blundering God is less human and more godlike than a God who – as in my alternatives - knows exactly what he wants and creates it without any mistakes or failures.

DAVID: I don't see your 'no-failure' evolution in our history, do you???

Yet again you refuse to answer a straight question. I have already answered yours over and over again, as follows:

dhw: What you call failures are dead ends, but if it was your God’s INTENTION to create a vast variety of life forms that came and went (e.g. in a free-for-all), you cannot call them failures!

In all three of my alternative theistic explanations of evolution, there are no failures. Now please answer my question.

dhw: Evolution does not progress through its dead ends but through the 1% of life forms that survive.

DAVID: Exactly my point!!

dhw: So why did you say evolution succeeds through a succession of failures???

DAVID: Because that is the flip side way of looking at it.

That is the basis of your new theory! Yet again: you keep telling us that your God is responsible for the mess because 99% of his designs were mistakes/failed experiments, but he knew that they would be mistakes because he foresaw the future. So knowing that he was going to create a mess apparently makes him more godlike than a God who (in my alternatives) achieves his purpose without any mess/mistakes/failed experiments, as follows:

dhw: I propose different theistic reasons for the evolution that actually happened. One is experimentation, which you rejected but now embrace, adding your view that your God messed it up with his 99% “failures”. (Addition: in this proposal, I allow for your goal of a being like himself, but his experiments are highly successful - e.g. the dinosaurs, who ruled the world for 150 million years - but he continued to investigate further possibilities in his ongoing quest.) You reject the voyage of discovery, which is the purpose behind the “new ideas” theory and the “free-for-all” theory. Nothing weird, no mistakes, no failures.

DAVID: A wooly view of our evolution from a humanistic standpoint. My simple approach is to assume God is in charge and the standard history of evolution is His Work. He knows exactly what will happen. From our human standpoint, the dead ends are failures of design, and guide the way to design the 1% success rate.

If God exists, of course the “standard history” is his work. But yet again: you think your interpretation of standard history as being 99% God’s messy mistakes and failures make him more godlike than my interpretation, with no messy mistakes or failures. And for the nth time, dead ends do not guide anything anywhere. It’s the 1% that have led to the current world of humans plus our food.

DAVID: God designs for all conditions. See Permian extinction presented today.

Permian mass extinction

DAVID: I'm going to stick with my theory that these events were natural, not under God's control, and He was powerful enough to work around them. Remember He knew they were coming.

dhw: So these huge events were not under your God’s control, although in the bold above, “God is in charge of all events […] 3.X billion years wasting his time on mistakes he knew he was going to make, when he could just have waited for the Cambrian, which he knew was coming! Why are you making a fool of your God?

DAVID: I am not distorting God. That is your job in this discussion, and you have done a marvelous job of distortion. I'm simply taking the known history of evolution and stating God created it.

As above, you are interpreting the known history in a way that makes your God look like an incompetent fool (as you continue to do under “Finding first stars” on the other thread).