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

by David Turell , Monday, March 27, 2023, 18:04 (605 days ago) @ dhw

PART ONE

dhw: 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%.

It is your dodge, not mine. The living evolutionary process is historical fact, and it produced us. It much require screening with a 99.9% loss of individual species. It makes perfect sense, as a believer in God, to assume God chose to create us this way. Adler assumed this approach in His proof of God. The problem is you don't like God's choice.

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: 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.

dhw: 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.

Illogical only to you as a non-believer. And don't throw agnosticism at me. It is non-belief with a caveat of slight possibility.

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!!

dhw: 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).

Environment/climate is based on Earth's position from the sun, sunspots, Earth's tilt, moon's gravitational effects, general fixed repeated patterns like El Nino/ La Nina in the Pacific. Oxygen is a similar general fixed condition for the environment/climate. Of course, God made those adjustments when indicated. After all, He is the creator. Snowball Earth tells us God can design for any eventuality. Your usual dodge of a complaint is a molehill, not a mountain .

Supernovas and biodiversity

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.

dhw: 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.

As far as I am concerned, your type of God does not fit any theistic theory I have read. Your personal God is an outlier.