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

by dhw, Tuesday, March 28, 2023, 12:38 (604 days ago) @ David Turell

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%.

DAVID: It is your dodge, not mine. The living evolutionary process is historical fact, and it produced us.

Correct. It also produced countless life forms that had no connection with us or our food.

DAVID: It much require screening with a 99.9% loss of individual species.
And later:
dhw: Please explain why your God could not have designed us and our food if he hadn’t first designed the brontosaurus (which did NOT belong to the species which evolved into birds).

DAVID: All part of a required screening pattern as evolution requires.

You forget that evolution did not “require” anything. You insist that your God invented and directed the process of evolution, which means that he obliged himself to create 99% of individual species that were not required for what you believe to have been his one and only purpose.

DAVID: 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.

Our discussion is about your God’s purpose and method, not his existence. It does not make sense that an all-powerful God with one goal would choose to fulfil that goal in the messy, inefficient, cumbersome way (your description) you believe in. It’s your silly theory about God’s choice of purpose and method that I don’t like.

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.

DAVID: 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.

Stop pretending that my non-belief in your illogical theory of evolution and my proposal of three logical theistic alternatives has anything to do with my agnosticism (which means 50/50 belief/non-belief in God's existence).

The environment

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

DAVID: 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.

The question is not what environment/climate are based on, but how much control your God has over them.

DAVID: Of course, God made those adjustments when indicated. After all, He is the creator.

So now what are you saying? One moment your God has no control over environmental changes, and the next moment he adjusts them! Make up your mind.

DAVID: Snowball Earth tells us God can design for any eventuality. Your usual dodge of a complaint is a molehill, not a mountain.

Your usual dodge: if he does not control environmental changes, he can only RESPOND to them, which means his scope for design is limited to those life forms that can cope with the new environment. When this changes again, once more 99% of his new designs cannot adapt, and so they die out as dead ends that do not lead to us and our food. Only the 1% can do that. Hence what you call the inefficient, cumbersome mess that your theory leads you to.