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

by dhw, Thursday, March 30, 2023, 11:51 (602 days ago) @ David Turell

PART ONE

DAVID: […] God's evolution had a purpose!!

dhw: Of course if he exists he must have had a purpose in inventing the process of evolution! But that does not explain why, if his only purpose was to create us and our food, he proceeded to create 99 out of 100 species that had nothing to do with his purpose. Stop dodging the issues. My alternative theistic theories offer three different, logical explanations for the 99% of life forms that had nothing to do with the evolution of us and our food.

DAVID: So you think God just stumbled into AN ending result of humans and their food supply.

In my first two theories, he deliberately conducts experiments which finally lead to us and our food. There is no stumbling. You have him designing 99 out of 100 species that have no connection with the single purpose you impose on him, being forced to tailor his designs to environmental conditions over which he has no control, and then taking control of the conditions and starting our line of evolution with species that have no predecessors, and yet still producing other species that have no connection with his purpose. He can't help it, though, because he has to follow the rules he's made up for himself about "screening". You rightly call this method an inefficient, cumbersome mess. But apparently he's not stumbling. Elsewhere this method is described as "magnificent".

DAVID: I'm not dodging from my point an authority like Adler used the end point of humans as proving God existed. Your theories create an unsure humanistic God.

For the 100th time, our disagreement is not over the possible existence of God, but over your absurdly illogical theory concerning his inefficient, cumbersome, messy method of achieving what you believe to have been his purpose. In none of my theories is God “unsure”, and he is no more human than in your own theories.

DAVID (re agnosticism): You claim 50/50 but argue 95/5

dhw: This discussion of your illogical theory is based entirely on interpretations of a possible God’s purpose and method. I offer you three alternative, logical explanations for a possible God’s design of life’s history, and apparently that makes me 95% atheist! Stop dodging the issues.

DAVID: You do not see yourself as I do.

Your blinkered vision of my agnosticism is still no defence of your illogical theories, and it does not provide any grounds for rejecting my theories, which you agree fit in logically with the history of evolution. Stop dodging the issues.

The environment

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

DAVID: Certain general conditions must be set by God. The rest are always variable.

dhw: The randomly variable ones you accept include such major events as forests turning into deserts and asteroids hitting the Earth. You attribute the 99% “failure rate” to your God’s faulty design,

DAVID: I've changed my terms on God's new species as "designed with limited adaptability".

If the limited adaptability which caused their non-survival was deliberate (as opposed to being a fault in the design), and they had no connection with his purpose, why would he have designed them in the first place? Stop dodging the issues.

dhw: ...you have him then designing new organisms to cope with the new conditions, and then the same process repeats itself until finally he decides to take control of the environment (Cambrian) and design one which will enable him to design the only life forms he really wanted to design in the first place. He then designs our ancestors from scratch, so he needn’t have bothered with all the failures in the first place.

DAVID: God designs de novo forms as He wishes. You make an interesting new interpretation of the Cambrian Gap.

Of course if he exists and is all-powerful he can design de novo forms whenever he wishes. Hence the unanswerable question why, if his only wish was to design us plus our food, he “wished” to design 99 out of a 100 species that had nothing to do with us. You can’t answer, and so you go on dodging, or you admit that only your God can explain such a silly theory. It is your interpretation of the Cambrian Gap that is new, since at one and the same time you inform us that we are descended from Archaea but that we are descended from species which your God designed de novo, i.e. with no predecessors. Waffling about biochemistry does not resolve this blatant contradiction.