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

by dhw, Thursday, March 30, 2023, 12:01 (602 days ago) @ dhw

PART TWO

Cyclones

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID: There is no way for us to agree. God knew how to make our universe at the start. It is precisely fine-tuned for life. He invented life and then chose to evolve us from initial Archaea. An evolutionary process is a screening process which in our case involved a 99.9% loss of forms, but successfully produced us.

Once more: Why would he invent a system that forces him deliberately to design 99 out of 100 forms that are irrelevant to his purpose, and to design the means of “screening” (killing them off), although he can “design de novo forms as he wishes” and he only wishes to design us and our food? See your definition of a “real” theistic God below.

dhw: 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: My God knew exactly how to evolve us over time. You can criticise, but God made choices you disagree with. You create the problem with illogical analysis of God.

You know perfectly well that it is your theory about God’s choices that I disagree with, and I offer alternative choices which you agree are logical, but which you consider to be more “human” than the inefficient, cumbersome, messy choices you illogically inflict on him.

Supernovas and biodiversity

Dhw: […] 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. […] 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: I mean exactly this: my God is fully purposeful and knows what He wishes to create and creates it by evolving it.

As usual, you come up with a generalization which – if God exists – I don’t suppose anyone would reject, apart from people who don’t believe in evolution. The issue is what he wished to create, and how he used the process of evolution in order to fulfil his purpose. Once more you have dodged the issue of possible purposes other than your own version.

dhw: 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.

DAVID: What is nonsense is your total misunderstanding of an evolutionary process. It screens and survival rates are very small. Point is proven.

As above, if God exists, he invented the process! You don’t need to “prove” that 99% of species did not survive (and your “screening” is just another term for natural selection). What is nonsense is your insistence that your God subjected himself to an inexplicable obligation to design 99 out of 100 species that had no connection with the purpose you impose on him. Stop dodging.

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. […] You could hardly have made it clearer that your God is not a “real theistic God” at all.

DAVID: He is fully theistic as described. If God made history, as I believe, God chose to evolve us!!!

But a “real ‘theistic’ God produces what he wants directly, and your version of God chose to produce 99 out of 100 species that had nothing to do with us plus food, and even when he eventually got round to designing anthropoids, he still didn’t produce us sapiens directly. I suppose this is another example of your revolutionary use of language: perhaps the word “directly” is allegorical, and actually means “indirectly”?