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

by dhw, Wednesday, March 29, 2023, 09:55 (603 days ago) @ dhw

PART TWO

Cyclones

DAVID: These major events are not major enough for God to exert controls. They are built in to happen randomly. They do not create such a disturbance that it makes God have 'luck' in trying to design evolutionary advances. "Luck" is dhw's illogical invention. Snowball Earth destroys his point.

dhw: […] According to you, among other uncontrolled major events affecting speciation are forests turning into deserts and asteroids causing mass extinctions. All luck, but you can't understand why "dhw somehow thinks luck is involved!" “Trying to design evolutionary advances” sounds just like experimentation to me, and the destruction of 99% by forces beyond his control sounds very much like the cause of what you once called “failed experiments” – because those designs did not lead to us and our food. You disown the expression, but it continues to explain why you call his method messy, inefficient and cumbersome.

DAVID: What you call experimentation, I see as purposeful designs.

There is no contradiction. In one of my theories, your God experiments with the purpose of finding the best formula for creating a being in his own image (which eventually turns out to be us). But with your theory, you can’t find any reason why he would design 99 out of 100 life forms that have no connection with that purpose. You won’t even acknowledge that his lack of control over conditions restricts him to designing life forms that will cope with those conditions, and provides an obvious reason why the 99% would not lead to us and our food, since conditions keep randomly changing. “Trying to design evolutionary advances” is hardly commensurate with a God who knows exactly what he wants and exactly how to get it.

DAVID: You are overwhelmed by your conceived beloved humanized weak God who must experiment to develop anything.

I have offered three different theistic explanations for the history of evolution as we know it. In all of them, God acts perfectly logically. Only your theory makes him create an inefficient, cumbersome mess, and I have no idea why such a blunderer is stronger, less human and more godlike than a God who knows and creates precisely what he wants.

Supernovas and biodiversity

DAVID: If you believe God chose to evolve us, it makes perfect sense. God may have other ancillary goals. I've never said 'none'.

dhw: It does not make sense that an all-powerful God would choose to design 99 irrelevant life forms out of 100. So I have asked you what other purpose he might have had for designing them. You won’t tell us, because you know that they might turn out to support theories which are different from yours. Stop dodging.

A fine example of this is your certainty that your God enjoys creating and watches his creations with interest. This provides an obvious purpose for all his designs (not just us and our food), and so you try to wriggle out of it with your nonsense about your own beliefs not meaning what you mean!

DAVID: Preposterous!! I'm not hiding behind God theories, other than cerating Humans because nothing else is obvious.

The only obvious facts are that humans and lots of other life forms are here, and countless extinct life forms preceded us and did not evolve into us or our contemporary life forms. Evolutionists believe that we and our contemporaries evolved in a continuum through the 1% of survivors. It is the 99% of non-survivors that make nonsense of your theory of evolution, unless you genuinely believe that your God is an inefficient and cumbersome mess-maker.

Common descent

DAVID: A real 'theistic' God does not need experimentation. He knows what He wants to produce and produces it directly.

dhw: Except that he did NOT directly produce what you believe to have been his one and only purpose. You never stop contradicting yourself.

DAVID: No contradiction. God's choice of evolution to produce us was purposeful.

A real ‘theistic’ God knows what he wants and “produces it directly”, but your God does not produce it directly – he produces it through what you call an inefficient, cumbersome, messy process of evolution which results in his producing 99 out of 100 species that have nothing to do with what you believe to have been his purpose. Even when he eventually gets round to producing anthropoids, he still doesn’t produce sapiens directly! You could hardly have made it clearer that your God is not a “real theistic God” at all.