Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, March 07, 2023, 11:09 (625 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: God chose to do it stepwise fully recognizing in advance the necessary failure to survive rate:

dhw: Why do you keep omitting your belief that the 99% were your God’s mistakes and failed experiments? You make it sound as if your God, the creator of all things, was confronted by an immutable law: “thou must make 99 mistakes before thou createst the one thing thou wishest to create.” If God exists, yes, he created the system of evolution. And if he is all-powerful and all-knowing, it is absurd to argue that he had no choice but to make mistakes and conduct failed experiments.

DAVID: Failure to survive at a 99.9% rate is historical fact. I believe God used evolution to create His desired endpoint, us.

Of course it’s historical fact, and that is why it is so absurd to argue that your all-powerful God deliberately designed every single life form in order to design us and our food, although 99% of the life forms he designed were irrelevant to us and our food!

dhw: And you regard this as brilliant design, whereas you think a God who gets what he wants without making any mistakes is a blunderer.

DAVID: You've reversed our views. Your God is a simple humanized form while you consider mine a blunderer.

dhw: You have just agreed that yours makes mistakes, his designs are faulty etc. That = a blunderer. Mine does not make mistakes but creates successes. Apparently that turns him into a simple human being.

DAVID: Does your God speciate by Himself?

In my first two alternatives, yes. But he does not make mistakes and his experiments are not failures. In my third, he leaves it to the cells themselves. Now please stop dodging, and tell me why your God’s mistakes do not make him a blunderer, and why my God’s faultless creation of what he wants to create makes him a simple human being.

dhw: Your form of evolution is based on your God making countless mistakes and depending on luck to provide him with the conditions he needs in order to fulfil his one and only purpose.

DAVID: God does not need luck. He can design for any conditions available. Extremophiles are the proof.

dhw: […]. Extremophiles prove that he can REACT to any conditions. But if he does not control conditions, he needs luck to provide those that will enable him to fulfil his only purpose.

DAVID: Please accept God can design for all conditions.

I have just accepted that. Now please accept that if your God does not control conditions, he is limited to designing new species which can cope with those conditions, even though they have no connection with his one and only purpose, which you say is us and our food.

DAVID: [..] Your cry of "luck" is a ghost of any logic. Life under God's design evolved steadily.

It is you who keep harping on about Raup’s theory that survival is a matter of luck, and it is you who claim that God REACTS to conditions he cannot control (as above), thereby needing luck to provide the conditions which will enable him to design us and our food. I don’t know about life evolving steadily. It seems to have evolved in bursts, following long periods of stasis (“punctuated equilibrium”).

The Cambrian

DAVID: Cambrian is phenotypic change, not biochemical change. All based on Edicaran biochemistry.

All life is based on biochemistry. Humans are distinct species, and you claim that your God created our ancestors without predecessors, i.e. our ancestors did not descend from previous species. For you the creation of species de novo is crucial evidence for God’s very existence and for your constant attacks on Darwin, but of course it makes nonsense of your theory that we (plus food) were your all-powerful God’s purpose from the very beginning, and so he had to create countless life forms that had nothing to do with us (plus food).

DAVID: Darwin's evolution is the same, a 99.9% failure to survive rate, a different way to think about his theory.

We all accept that 99% of species became extinct. How does that change the fact that all adaptations and innovations are geared to the struggle for survival? Even your God has to ensure that his new designs will survive in the new conditions.

Bipedalism

dhw: My suggestion is that[Lucy’s] body had evolved from earlier “transitional” bodies, as our ancestors’ bodies adapted to their new surroundings. Now please tell us why you think our ancestors might have decided to stay on the ground if it wasn’t for the purpose of improving their chances of survival.

DAVID: I doubt they thought as we do. The bipedal body is not fit to stay in trees. They were forced by their new design to be terrestrial.

So one morning a group of anthropoids woke up to find themselves with straightened backs and legs, which forced them out of the trees and onto the ground. But even then your God knew he’d have to keep popping in to operate on hominins and hominids and homos till he could get what he wanted (us plus food), though he needn’t have bothered with any of them because he could have created us de novo if he’d wanted to. I'm surprised that you think even God can understand your theories.