Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, March 21, 2023, 09:02 (401 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: […] Allegorical applies only to God's personal emotions!!!

dhw: So what do YOU mean when you say you are sure your God enjoys creating and watches his creations with interest?

DAVID: We use our words with a meaning for us that is, in some sense, not an equal meaning for God.

“In some sense”? YOU used the words. Why did you say you were sure your God watched us with interest and enjoyed creating if YOU didn’t mean what the words mean to you? This is one of your silliest ever dodges.

DAVID: Repeat: God limited adaptability as only He can speciate. My unchanged point is God used a cumbersome system to successfully produce us.

dhw: More nonsense talk. “Only he can speciate” does not explain why an all-powerful God would design 99% of organisms that had no connection with his only purpose! Or why he invented a “cumbersome system” which forced him to make mistakes and conduct failed experiments and come up with faulty designs!

DAVID: Please attempt to absorb a clear point. Limited adaptability obviously results in poor survival rates. That only looks like design failure. Evolution produces a 0.1% survival rate which successfully produced us. I cannot explain why God chose this method. But that is of no matter to me, only to you.

Of course limited adaptability results in poor survival rates. No dispute. You expressly said that it was caused by faulty design. In your theory, it is not evolution but your God who produced a 0.1% survival rate and a 99% failure rate. However, I’m going to juxtapose an exchange which is of fundamental importance to this discussion:

dhw: If you now wish to withdraw your vehement criticism of what you call your God’s “messy”, “inefficient” and “cumbersome” method of achieving what you call his one and only goal (us plus our food), and dependence [edited] on luck providing the right environment, then please say so, and I’ll be delighted to move on.

DAVID: Please note I have changed my descriptive approach. What, on the surface, looks like mistakes and failures is actually planned limited adaptability. Thus, neat planning.

So you are indeed now withdrawing your vehement criticism of an inefficient God who blunders from one mistake to another. At last. We are therefore left with the theory that he deliberately designed the 99% of life forms which did not lead to his one and only purpose, and deliberately designed them in such a way that they would not survive. Why might he have done that? We agree that he would not have done anything he didn’t want to do, so he must have had a reason. And by your own admission, you can’t think of one. I have offered you three possible explanations which fit in with your new theory that your God did not after all blunder into one mistake after another. Perhaps you will take at least one of them more seriously. (See “More miscellany”, for your usual distortions.) Meanwhile, we are still left with your self-contradictory insistence that a supposedly all-powerful God had no control over the environment, and therefore depended on luck to provide the right conditions for him to fulfil what you insist was his only purpose:

dhw: […] luck provides him with the environment he needs (Cambrian), whereupon he starts afresh to produce our ancestors de novo, thereby rendering all his previous efforts irrelevant, although even after the Cambrian, he still continues to design life forms that do not lead to his goal […].

DAVID: Oxygen in the Cambrian era isn't luck!! God earlier created cyanobacteria to make enough oxygen. You are back to slicing up evolution into disconnected eras. To have it your way, God makes all His own luck.

One moment he has no control over the environment, and the next moment, he is designing the environment. One moment he blunders, and the next moment there are no mistakes. One moment he watches with interest, and the next moment the words mean he’s not interested. If your God was able to design the environment he needed for his one and only purpose, why did he bother with all the preceding environments and all the preceding 99% of irrelevant life forms, and all the post-Cambrian life forms that still had nothing to do with us and our food? You can’t explain it, so maybe at least one more of these theories might also be wrong. The discussion continues.