Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, March 13, 2023, 15:49 (409 days ago) @ dhw

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

dhw: 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.

dhw: 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.

Once again you apply human thought to God's possible thinking pattern. I view it as trivializing God.

(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.

dhw: 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.)

Of course I agree God must drsign for existing environments. And of course He saw to it oxygen reached the proper level for the evolution of complex animals in the Cambrian. God provides everything necessary to advance evolution. He is in control of the factors that require control.

dhw’s – corrected to David Turell’s obsession with ‘humans plus food’

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.

dhw: 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.)

Watching. The Catholic church thinks He is still performing miracles.

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.

dhw: 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!

Proof of God is an issue here in an agnostic website.