Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, March 21, 2023, 15:24 (611 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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:

As for environment, hot. cold, or warm; wet or dry; forested or grassland; high or low altitude, all easily designed for, BUT as God advanced/evolved biochemistry He arranged for a necessar oxygen supply from cyanobacteria to provide it.

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.

dhw: 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.

My explanation above tells you God does not need luck. Adler describes at length how to think about God when our terms cannot be exactly applied to God, thus allegory.