Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, March 12, 2023, 11:42 (620 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: But failure induces the need for improvement with God's new designs.

dhw: So does your God create 99% brand new species from scratch? It is the 1% of survivors that he can improve on! Or do you think the mistakes teach him what needs to be improved? No, your God never learns anything, does he? He knows it all in advance, including the fact that he is going to make 99 mistakes for every one success!

DAVID: Weird interpretation as usual. Yes, God builds on past biochemistry and forms. Repeat: limited adaptability means God steps in to provide better adapted species by speciation.

More obfuscation. Limited adaptability according to you is caused by your all-powerful God’s faulty design, which results in 99% of his species being labelled “mistakes” by you, because they do not lead to his one and only goal (us plus food). He steps in after every extinction, and fiddles with the 1% of survivors to create more species that can cope with the new environment (over which he had no control). But then along comes another change of environment causing another lot of 99% mistakes. And so on until the Cambrian, when your all-powerful God doesn’t even work on the 1% but starts all over again by designing our ancestors (plus food) from scratch. All totally illogical.

DAVID: So, God is illogical in your view.

No! YOU are illogical! And you try to make him illogical with your illogicalities!

DAVID: But evolution is what God created! In my view that God created all of reality we cannot know why He chose to use living evolution. Is your view that the illogical creation form means no God can have caused it?

This is becoming sillier and sillier. If God exists, then he chose to use evolution in order to fulfil whatever may have been his purpose. I have offered you three logical THEISTIC interpretations of the history of evolution, none of which present the blundering, inefficient, cumbersome God you insist on.

(Transferred from “More miscellany”:

DAVID: You keep forgetting, you agreed God can chose any method He wishes. God choses for His own reasons. I simply accept it.

dhw: That is the whole point. Your all-powerful version of God chose a method which involved making 99% mistakes and failed experiments in pursuit of a goal which he could have designed directly. Why didn’t he “wish” to do so? Your theory: he had no choice, because the system he invented forced him to make all these mistakes, and he knew it would. Daft! I’ve offered three alternative explanations for the history we know […]

DAVID: Your God who experiments, has no real goal, as shown by His love of free-for-alls for entertainment, and who relies on cell committees for hands-off speciation, is a theistic joke of a humanization of God. Wow, an agnostic defending God!

Your attack on my theories does not provide any defence of your own absurd theory. There is no point in repeating my three alternatives, except to say they all have “real goals”, and I cannot see why a God who designs precisely what he wants to design, without making mistakes, is a “joke of a humanization” compared to your all-powerful God, who deliberately designs 99 mistakes for every one success, and relies on luck to provide him with the environment he needs in order to achieve his goal.

The rest of your post is devoted to your prejudice against the theory of cellular intelligence, as proposed by Shapiro, continuing the work of McClintock and Margulis, and supported by many other scientists in the field.

dhw’s obsession with ‘humans plus food’

DAVID: dhw does not understand how my form of God views this. He foresaw our burgeoning population but provided us with the means of solving the problems. He needn't step in. Evolution is over.

This must be one of the daftest attacks you have made on me. The whole article concerns the threat we humans pose to all the ecosystems we depend on, and of which I am just as aware as you and the author. The “obsession” with humans plus food is yours, because you insist that humans plus food were your God’s one and only purpose for creating life – a theory which leads to all the absurdities dealt with above.

As for your final comment, your God’s clairvoyance and deistic detachment do not explain any of the above illogicalities. Yet another attempt by you to divert attention from your absurd theory of evolution.