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

by dhw, Friday, March 31, 2023, 11:11 (601 days ago) @ David Turell

Yet more repetition, I'm afraid, but there seems to be no end to the ways in which the issues raised by David's theories can be dodged!

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

dhw: 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: You stretch reality to think the history of evolution shows experimentation. Almost all advances are quite direct and the Cambrian directly refutes the theory. It shows God had no need to experiment.

You have totally ignored the whole of my comment. Your version of the Cambrian is that he designed our ancestors from scratch. That theory does indeed show that there was no need to experiment. And there was no need for the 99 out of 100 irrelevant species you say he designed before and after the Cambrian. These 99 were not “direct advances” towards us and our food! So what is your explanation? The absurd idea that he invented an inefficient system which forced him to design 99 species out of 100 that he then had to get rid of! At least the experimentation theory doesn’t make him into the cumbersome mess-maker you want him to be.

The environment

dhw: 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".

dhw: 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.

DAVID: If a stage has limited adaptability, it means they cannot speciate and God must do it.

According to you, it was your God who designed them with limited adaptability and then had to kill them off because they had nothing to do with his one and only purpose. Hence your description of his work as inefficient, cumbersome and messy.

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

dhw: 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.

DAVID: My contention still is God chose to evolve us by the method history shows. No dodge. Basic biochemistry advances to allow more complex phenotypes. No waffle but your lack of understanding the relationship at two levels of evolution.

History does not even show us that there is a God, but for the sake of argument, we are discussing a possible God’s motives and methods. For those of us who believe in evolution, history shows that we and every other multicellular organism evolved from single cells, and yes indeed, biochemistry advanced to allow more complex phenotypes, 99% of which did not lead to us our food. The 99% make nonsense of your claim that we and our food were your all-powerful God’s one and only purpose for creating life. Your only explanation for his creating them is that he invented an inefficient, cumbersome, messy system which forced him to create 99 out of 100 species irrelevant to his purpose. But you reject any alternative which obviates the need for such a derogatory view of your God.