More "miscellany" PART ONE (General)

by dhw, Friday, February 17, 2023, 14:19 (405 days ago) @ David Turell

PART ONE

Apologies for more repetitions, but many topics that are interesting in themselves inevitably lead back to David's theory of evolution.

An early form

dhw: […] His ability to handle changing conditions does not explain why you think he chose not to control those conditions. Please tell us.

DAVID: I've told you!! He can design for any conditions.

dhw: That is not a reason for him to have restricted his scope of design to whatever suited the conditions he did not control.

DAVID: Where did you get that restriction??? ALL conditions presented no problem.

According to you, every uncontrolled change in conditions resulted in 99% of his designs turning into mistakes/failed experiments, so his next round of experiments was restricted by the new conditions. This blundering process continued through countless millions of mistakes and failed experiments until at last conditions were suitable for him to design our ancestors.

Early humans

dhw: Since you believe that your God’s system consisted of 99% “failed experiments”, will you accept that the earlier hominins and homos were successful experiments, with which your God gradually improved on his 1% of successes as he went along?

DAVID: Each successful until they disappeared.

dhw: Yes.Thank you. Would you agree that non-bird dinosaurs were successful until they disappeared?

DAVID: Yes. (dhw’s bolds)

dhw: We are making real progress. If we adopt our shared theory that your God experimented, we now have life forms which did not lead to us plus our food (e.g. 99% of dinosaurs), but which you deem to have been successful, i.e. they were not mistakes, or failed experiments. That is the essence of all my alternative theories. Your God WANTED the vast variety of living forms – not as “absolute requirements” for us and our food, but as an end in themselves. There are no “mistakes”. He created what he wanted to create.

Your response is a series of statements that have no relevance to the point I have just made, as follows:

DAVID: Of course, God created what He wished to, but all with a purposeful plan in mind.

That is why you call 99% of his creations mistakes – because they had no connection with the plan you impose on him (us and our food). So how do the successful 99% non-bird dinosaurs fit in?

DAVID: The vast bush of life is our current food supply. We are currently considering insects!!!

99% of past bushes had no connection with our current bush. We are currently considering dinosaurs, 99% of which (birds are the other 1%) had no connection with us, which in your theory would make them mistakes and failures, but which you now see as successes. So perhaps you should reconsider your theory that your God’s only purpose was to create us plus food, since that is the criterion by which you judge whether a life form has been a mistake or not.

DAVID: WE do not share the same view of God experimenting. Mine is God attempting to create new forms prepared to adapt to environmental conditions commonly fail to survive (99.9%). God's attempts are His form of experimentation, not what dhw wishes.

Your God’s “attempts” are forms of experimentation that you regard as being 99% unsuccessful/mistakes/wrong choices etc. as a result of his faulty designs. You’re right, that is not the sort of God I envision, and so I offer you alternatives in which your God achieves his purpose/conducts his experiments without any mistakes, e.g. the 99% dinosaurs which did not lead to us and our food.

Great oxidation event came earlier

DAVID: God made the Cambrian without predecessors. Natual evolution cannot do that! Remember Darwin's worries about this.

dhw: If your God exists, you have him waiting till the Cambrian provided him with the right conditions, and then he fulfilled his sole purpose (designing our ancestors and our foods) from scratch. No need then for what you must regard as pre-Cambrian 100% mistakes and failed experiments.

DAVID: But it all happened as a history of God’s actions or inactions.

If God exists, yes. And you present a history of your God’s incompetent, error-strewn pursuit of a single purpose, the fulfilment of which comes about after millions of mistakes, even though – as you keep emphasizing - he is perfectly capable of designing whatever he wants without any of the preceding blunders.

Epigenetics

DAVID: God handles all. God has His mechanism of design.

dhw: Not clear. Do you mean your God designed the unknown mechanism which enables organisms to adapt and innovate without his intervention, or do you mean he has to operate the mechanism for every individual organism, or 3.8 billion years ago he designed the mechanism with instructions for every adaptation and innovation throughout the whole future of life on Earth?

DAVID: I believe God provided simple adaptive mechanisms that we all know exist in all organisms.

I'm including innovation, which is essential for evolution.Same question as above.


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