Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, March 17, 2023, 11:10 (615 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: What!!! God taught us how to love??? Pure religiosity from an agnostic.

dhw: I didn’t record this quote either, but it stuck in my mind: you were happy with the idea that your God knew what love was, but you don’t like the idea that he might have created life because he enjoys creating and having interesting things to watch, even though you are sure he enjoys creating and watches with interest.

DAVID: To entertain Himself is a self-centered reason to create. God creates selflessly.

So when you say he enjoys creating and watches his creations with interest, you actually mean he doesn’t enjoy creating and doesn’t watch with interest. And please tell me where you get your information from. Have you ever read the Old Testament? It’s riddled with your God’s focus on himself, to the extent that if anyone dares to believe in any other God, they should not only be killed, but whole cities should be destroyed. (Many humans have actually followed these instructions.) I have no objection at all if you reject the OT, as I did in my youth. I just thought you might like to be reminded of this self-centred, “official” version. But I must confess, I can find no logic whatsoever in your belief that an all-powerful, all-knowing God creates a system that forces him into making 99% of mistakes and failed experiments in his pursuit of a single purpose. And I find absolutely nothing wrong with the assumption that he would not create if he didn’t enjoy creating, and he would not watch with interest if he wasn’t interested.

DAVID: His watching is not the same as our watching. Remember our previous discussions about allegorically different.

The term “allegorically different” is meaningless. You are making a mockery of language. Please tell us what YOU mean by watching if you do not mean paying attention to what is happening.

dhw: There is no reason at all to assume that the supposed creator of all things has not endowed his creations with some of his own “thought patterns and emotions” – as you agreed long ago. I don’t know why you think a God who enjoys creating is “highly humanized”, whereas a God who blunders into making 99% of mistakes in his designs, and relies on luck to provide the conditions necessary for his one and only purpose, counts as more godlike than one who only creates what he wants to create.

DAVID: Your God and mine both create what they wish to create. God's use of an evolutionary process to advance life is history and it tells us 99.9% of all life failed to survive. That tells us such a survival rate is required in evolving life.

But it does not tell us that your all-powerful God’s one and only purpose was to create us and our food, and therefore the 99% failure rate was the result of his faulty designs, mistakes, failed experiments, inefficient and cumbersome method. All of these are your own words. I have offered you three different theistic theories to explain the 99% of non-survivors without turning your God into an incompetent blunderer, but you firmly believe that the blunderer is more godlike than a designer who makes no mistakes.

DAVID: Your version of God. As for theistic thinking at least I have been taught by a philosopher of religion. Who taught you?

dhw: I rejected what I was taught at synagogue and at school, and I wonder which philosopher of religion taught you that your all-powerful, all-knowing God was an inefficient designer who blundered into a 99% failure rate etc. as bolded above. And why do you believe such a theory when you can’t even understand it yourself?

DAVID: I understand it perfectly. God chose to evolve us and I accept what He did. Adler accepted evolution as God's doing. He did not discuss survival rates.

You have stated explicitly that your theories make sense only to God. But if God exists, then of course evolution is his doing. It’s the rest of your theory that is so absurd, and you have told us before that Adler does not cover it, so I don’t know why you keep trying to hide behind him.

Stromatolites

QUOTE: "In fact, most of life as we know it would never have developed on earth without those tireless little cyanobacteria colonies.”

DAVID: This shows how carefully God planned evolution. He had things worked out all in order of a necessary progression. Just as the survival rate of 0.01%b was necessary.

If God exists, then for those of us who believe in common descent, this is all perfectly and wonderfully logical (including the importance of stromatolites), except for your final comment, which omits virtually every illogical aspect of your theory of evolution! NECESSARY FOR WHAT? In brief, because this has become nauseatingly repetitive, why was it “necessary” for a God, whose one and only purpose was to design us and our food, to design 99% of life forms which you call “mistakes” and “failed experiments” because they had nothing to do with us and our food? And why would an all-powerful God create a system which forced him into these errors because he had no control over the environmental changes which restricted his scope for design?