Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, March 13, 2023, 12:59 (619 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID […] God builds on past biochemistry and forms. Repeat: limited adaptability means God steps in to provide better adapted species by speciation. […]

dhw: 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: Thank you for describing how messy a mechanism evolution is. Yet God used it, and we are here.

Thank you for acknowledging that this is indeed your theory of your God’s messy, error-strewn, illogical and inefficient evolution. I have offered you three alternatives that are not messy etc., but you dismiss them all because your blunderer is apparently more godlike than my version, who does what he wants to do without any blunders
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DAVID: You transform God into a humanized form who relies on cell committees to speciate, experiments because He is not sure of how to go forward, allows free-for-alls as another evidence of purposeless action, and likes free-for-alls as entertainment.

The free-for-all theory: He doesn’t rely on them to speciate - he designs them so that they can speciate. “Entertainment” is your choice of trivialising terminology. Our own love/enjoyment of creation, curiosity concerning what might happen if we explore the potential of our inventions, learning as we go along, finding different methods to achieve the optimum version of our goals, might all mirror what you have called his own “patterns of thought and emotions” and indeed logic.

DAVID: Compare: my truly theistic God is fully purposeful, knows what He wishes to create and does it. He uses an evolutionary method at each step: Big Bang, a universe evolves; the Earth is formed and evolves for life; life is created and evolves into us!

You know perfectly well that I accept the evolution you describe, and it is your theory of LIFE’S purpose and evolution that is so illogical that even you can’t understand it (it “makes sense only to God”). Stop dodging.

(Transferred from “More miscellany”:

dhw: Your attack on my theories does not provide any defence of your own absurd theory. […]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.

DAVID: "Luck" is your invention related to uncontrolled by God, environmental change. My powerful God can design for any environment that appears. It is your tunneled view of God that twists your thinking into inventing a powerless God to denigrate my theory of God.

It is you who have stated categorically that he does not control environmental changes. The theory that he can design species to survive any environment does not alter the fact that whatever species he designs at any given time must be able to live in the current conditions! He could not, in your theory, have designed humans when there was not enough oxygen for humans to breathe. (See the miscellany thread.)

dhw’s – corrected to David Turell’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.

dhw: […] 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.

DAVID: My clear description of a purposeful God who makes nonsense of your weird God is above. My obsession is my belief in God and how I think He created our reality.

Your clear description of your God’s purpose is that it was to create us and our food, and his method is “inefficient”, “cumbersome”, “messy”, and riddled with “mistakes” and “failed experiments”. These are all your terms. Meanwhile, please answer the following question: if evolution is over, and God needn’t step in, what do you think he is doing now? (I have a special reason for asking this question, so please don't dodge it.)

DAVID: You lack an ability to properly think about God. Adler, a philosopher of religion, used our evolution as a proof of God. Any followers of Adler or similar theists would laugh at your approach.

For the thousandth time, “proof of God” is not the issue here. And anyone who claims to have the ability to “properly think about God” is frankly….No, I shan’t finish this sentence, because I have too much respect and affection for you to do so!