More "miscellany" PARTS ONE & TWO (General)

by David Turell @, Wednesday, March 22, 2023, 17:47 (372 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: You raised the issue years ago, as to why God evolved us!! As I thought about it, evolution is a messy way to go. To manage it God limited adaptability and did all the speciation Himself, offering full control of directions and results.

dhw: I do not question the fact that we evolved, and if God exists, I would not question that he wanted and invented the process of evolution. Whether he did all the speciation himself is a moot point (see the free-for-all theory), but if he did, you have no idea why he would have deliberately invented a method which forced him into designing 99% of species that had no connection with what you say was his purpose (us and our food). You believe that apart from the Cambrian, your fully controlling God did NOT control environmental changes, so he was limited to designing species that would cope with CURRENT conditions, which meant he could not design the only species he wanted to design. The idea that he deliberately designed the 99% and deliberately “limited their adaptability” to ensure that they did not survive does not explain why he designed them in the first place.

The fact that He achieved designing us despite the adversity you describe, blows your argument out of the water. A purposeful God designer will advance evolution as He wishes despite any problems you perceive. Snowball Earth is the best example. One does not "explain" God. One analyzes His works for possible intent, with no certainty of conclusions.


DAVID (under “Giraffe plumbing”): Evolution, His choice of method, requires that miniscule survival rate!!

dhw: If he exists, your God made the rules. Why would he subject himself to a rule which demands the creation and non-survival of 99% irrelevant species?

That is exactly the point of this discussion. The end point of humans proved it didn't matter.


dhw: He knew exactly that he would have to deliberately design and eliminate 99% irrelevant species under conditions he could not control? Brilliant! You find your own theory incomprehensible (it makes sense only to God), but your mind is firmly closed to any other theistic explanation, even if it makes perfect sense.

Your very overly humanized God makes sense only to you.


dhw: There is no confusion if your God experiments with different life forms, either in order to create a particular one, or to see what new ideas he can come up with. Both theories culminate in us and our food, there are no “mistakes", but your God is not all-knowing.

DAVID: Now you are deciding how I imagine my all-knowing God!!!

dhw: You have told us how you imagine him: he knows that he’s going to create and then eliminate thousands of species that have nothing to do with the only species he wants to create, and that he has imposed an incomprehensibly messy set of rules on himself.

Nutty: please recognize an evolutionary process of life has a 99.9% loss of life rate.


Dissing Darwin

DAVID: God's evolution has the appearance of common descent. Both God and Darwin have the Cambrian gap.

dhw: You have told us that every innovation is a gap. When you say “has the appearance”, it sounds much like your dismissal of cellular intelligence, although cells “appear” to be intelligent. Should we now take it that you do not believe in common descent but in separate creation?

Common descent by design is not Darwin theory of common descent.


Weightlifting grows bigger bones

DAVID: Any aspect of our health is improved by working that part of the body. That adaptability is built into our design.

dhw: A comment that in my view is highly relevant to the subject of the human brain and its history of expansion and complexification. Bipedalism may have been literally the crucial first step, and new problems and solutions would have required new “exercises” and new connections as well as additional cells to perform those exercises. Just like bones and muscles, the brain RESPONDS to exercise, and does not change in anticipation of it.

Our huge brain appeared before its use.

Theoretical origin of life

DAVID: The report ignores chirality as usual. All amino acids in life are in 3-D lefthanded. Naturally formed amino acids will be 50/50 left and right. Just having amino acids lying around does not tell us how they jumped into forming living organisms.

dhw: This is one subject of discussion on which we are in agreement, and I wish we had an atheist to put the opposite view. The materials of life must have come from somewhere – no surprise here – but the belief that blind chance could combine them not just into living forms, but also into forms that can reproduce themselves, transmute themselves, and even be conscious of themselves, requires just as much faith as the belief in an immaterial mind that has no source and has been around for ever.

Yes faith is required.


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