Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, February 04, 2023, 07:58 (444 days ago) @ David Turell

Raup’s failure rate

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.

dhw: 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!

DAVID: When will you accept a discussion that recognized my point that God created the history of evolution and therefore, He knew there would be Raup's 99.9% failure rate? His goal of humans happened, so He was successful. This is a view of a perfectly competent God. Evolution is messy, God is not, so there is no reason to stain him with the mess as you do.

If God exists, he would certainly have created life and a method for evolution. That does not mean that he individually created every single life form, problem, solution, development, strategy, lifestyle, natural wonder etc., for the whole future of life, or that his only aim was to design us and our food, or that he would make mistake after mistake in pursuit of his goal, or that knew in advance that he would make mistake after mistake, or that he would be forced by conditions beyond his control to go on making mistakes until luck provided the right conditions for him to fulfil his goal. You have previously tried to compare yourself to God with your vast knowledge of design, telling us that firsthand design is the only reliable way to fulfil one’s purpose. So if your first 99 efforts to design your house had resulted in it falling down, but you finally succeeded, would you rate yourself a competent designer? And if you knew in advance that your house would fall down, would you praise yourself for knowing you would mess things up? If evolution is messy, and your God invented evolution, then he is responsible for the mess! You said so yourself less than two months ago:

DAVID: Once God appears, 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.”

However, if you really want to believe that he invented the system but did NOT create 99% worth of mistakes, you need look no further than my third explanation: he wanted and therefore designed a free-for-all (with the option of dabbling if he felt like it). No mistakes, no failed experiments. Total and endlessly fascinating success, as befits an all-powerful God.

DAVID: 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.

dhw: 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 makes 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: Yes, 1% survived and led to us. 99% failed to survive and lead anywhere. My view accounts for the 99%. In any discussion 'survival' is a crucial consideration. I view it as surviving long enough to create an improved modification for survival.

Your view accounts for the 99% by telling us that God knew he would make mistakes, and that means he is all-powerful and more godlike than a God who makes no mistakes. Yes, survival is crucial, and according to you, the 1% that survived and were “improved” survived by luck. The 99% of dead ends did NOT survive long enough to be “improved”. That is why they were dead ends!

Permian mass extinction

DAVID: I'm simply taking the known history of evolution and stating God created it.

dhw: As above, you are interpreting the known history in a way that makes your God look like an incompetent fool […]

DAVID: God chose the method of creation you criticize.

You claim that God chose the goal and method you have imposed on him: to create us by first making countless mistakes and conducting experiments, 99% of which were failures, as he knew they would be. And, unsurprisingly, you have no idea why he would have chosen such a method. Maybe he didn’t.