Return to David's theory of evolution PART ONE (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, March 27, 2023, 08:59 (605 days ago) @ David Turell

PART ONE

DAVID: Elimination is what evolution does. What else does sorting mean? Of course the process arrives at a very small set of survivors. You are creating an argument against the process itself! The process is what happened, and I view it as God-created, while you stick to God shouldn't have done it that way. So you end up arguing against history.

I’m not arguing against the process! Yet again you dodge the issue: why if his one and only purpose was to design us and our food, would he deliberately have designed 99% of non-survivors which had no connection with us and our food? It doesn’t make sense, and so I look for other reasons why your God might have created the 99%.

dhw: […] Why should inexplicable suppositions – yours make sense only to God - be more likely than others which fit in with the history of life as we know it?

DAVID: Of course God's actions make sense to Him!

dhw: Another equivocation. You have left out the all-important “only”. If your theory makes sense only to God, it does not make sense to you. Meanwhile, do please tell us what suppositions you have concerning possible "other goals".

DAVID: More word play. I accept what God created as His intentions, for his own unknown reasons.

If God exists, I have no doubt that he created what he intended to create. All three of my alternatives have him doing precisely that for perfectly logical reasons (see later).

DAVID: I don't have suppositions about God's other goals, if any, as I have concentrated on the obvious one, producing humans just as Adler did.

Then please stop using the word “goals”, which you know would open the door to alternative theories. You remain stuck with your one goal, and the illogicality of an all-powerful God who achieves it through a process you deride as an inefficient, cumbersome mess.

The environment

DAVID: Because of varying climate and environmental conditions dhw somehow thinks luck is involved!! […]

dhw: […] his lack of control over weather and environment meant luck determined what he could and couldn’t design under current conditions. You also believe luck determined which organisms failed to adapt when conditions changed, and so luck determined which 1% survived for him to work on at the next stage (until the Cambrian, when he started all over again).

DAVID: Back to Raup. Organisms had bad luck in not surviving. God never had to deal with bad luck since whatever were the environmental conditions, He could design for it. Snowball Earth!!

You never stop dodging. The point is not that your God had bad luck! Organisms had bad luck because his design did not allow them to adapt to new conditions. Since he had no control over conditions, he relied on luck to provide him with the 1% that did survive, and this process was repeated with every change, each of which limited his scope for design. I also said he must have relied on luck to provide the conditions enabling him to design the only organisms he wanted to design, but at that point you modified your theory, because suddenly he did control the environment by organizing an extra supply of oxygen (the Cambrian).

Supernovas and biodiversity

DAVID: This study says the cosmologic events change the Earth's environment. I stand by my theory that God does [not] interfere with or control these events. They happen and whatever results pop up God designs for them, no luck ever needed. […]

dhw: Yesterday your God was NOT in control […] but today your theory is that he DOES control such events!!!

DAVID: Sorry for the typing error. Not is reinserted where it belongs. The next sentence fits the 'not'. My general views never change. And you can't change them by constantly producing gross distortions of interpretations of my entries.

dhw: I really don’t think I should be blamed for your typing error, which totally reverses what you meant, and even emphasizes it. […] You constantly accuse me of gross distortions, but you have never given me an example. Please do so.

DAVID: You are not to be blamed if I mistype. You should never pounce on my startling change of theory. I've never done that and have been very consistent with sudden gross reversals. Please question the reversal.

Is there a misprint here too? I have listed some of your sudden gross reversals, and they generally coincide with the fact that those particular theories actually support my own. Which reversal would you like me to question?

DAVID: I declared distortions every time you produced them. The record is clear. The most famous one is I blithely accept your theological theories as 'logical'. My statement from years ago was they were consistently logical only with a highly humanized form of God, therefore not the God I accept.

The theory that your God might have produced the 99% because he enjoyed creating them and was interested in watching them only becomes illogical if you know that he doesn’t enjoy/isn’t interested, but you are sure he does and is! No distortion. Your rejection of my other theories because you view God differently does not alter their logic, which you acknowledge fits in with the history of life! Please try again.