Return to David's theory of evolution PARTS ONE & TWO (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, April 10, 2023, 08:17 (381 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Since when is God conceived as not all-knowing? This is a distinct contradiction to what most religion believe. That version leads you to create your very humanized God.

dhw: Since when did most religions inform us that your God deliberately designed 99 out of 100 species that were irrelevant to his sole purpose of creating us and our food, and had no control over the environment which dictated what life forms he could/could not design whenever conditions changed?

DAVID: Your bolded mantra above is a distortion of the fact that evolution occurred, Raup pointed out the necessary survival rate showing it was cumbersome. As the creator God ran the show because He wanted to.

You challenged the theory that God is not all-knowing on the grounds that most religions believe he IS all-knowing. How does that distort the fact that evolution occurred? Do most religions ask you to worship God for his inefficient, cumbersome, messy handling of evolution as pointed out by you and Raup? Of course if God exists, he would have wanted to run the show the way he wanted to run the show. How does that prove that he ran the show the inefficient, cumbersome, messy way you and Raup say he did? I have pointed out that your insistence on God’s omniscience is highly controversial among religious thinkers, as it entails the massive problems of free will (linked to predestination) and theodicy (why would an omniscient God deliberately create evil, knowing all its terrible consequences?)

DAVID: I had to look up Augustine and Pelagius. Thank you for the education. I follow Thomist thinking within Catholicism. The Bible, Adam and Eve are not part of my theology, nor Does Whitehead impress me. I follow the Catholic philosopher Ed Feser for some of his thinking. But I have my own brand of theism I follow.

A delightful confession from someone who criticizes my logical theistic explanations for evolution on the grounds that they contradict “what most religions believe”, and then proudly informs us that he has his own brand of theism, even to the extent of excluding the Bible and no doubt also the Koran, which form the basis of three major religions! (I used the Adam and Eve story as an illustration of the two problems, not as history.)

DAVID: Evolution as it is, makes perfect sense to me as I accept God as perfect in what He chooses to do.

dhw: You keep admitting that your theory does NOT make perfect sense to you because it makes sense only to God, and he is certainly not perfect in what YOU choose for him to do, because his method of fulfilling what you think is his purpose is, according to you, inefficient, cumbersome and messy. Stop flapping around behind these vague general protestations.

DAVID:I do not perceive the warts you apply to my God.

Please explain to us why you do not regard as a "wart" his inefficient, cumbersome and messy method of fulfilling his purpose by designing 99 out of 100 species that are irrelevant to that purpose.

DAVID: God evolved us by the historical system we know. As you pointed out years ago, using evolution to create us does not make as much sense as direct creation. We are exploring that issue now.

The issue is not simply why God chose the historical system of evolution that we know (I've offered you three logical explanations), but why, if he only had the one purpose you impose on him, he proceeded to create 99 out of 100 species that were irrelevant to his purpose. Stop dodging!

QUOTE: "Since most of the universe is beyond the Hubble radius, all those galaxies are forever out of reach. As time goes on, those galaxies will, one by one, disappear entirely from view. Not through any cheating of the laws of physics, but through simple (and inevitable) stretching."

DAVID: dhw wonders why God made it so big. Because that is what God wanted.

The usual edited version of what I “wonder”, leaving out the question why your God would have designed thousands of millions of galaxies if his sole purpose was to design our galaxy containing our planet containing us and our food. If he exists, maybe it would make more sense if he didn’t design every galaxy and every species, but set in motion all the processes of galaxy and species formation, and watched the results with interest.

Retina cells

QUOTE: “Our results indicate that living organisms' visual system has adapted to cope with natural constraints to improve the efficiency of their neuronal code.'"

The same comment might be made about the evolution of all organs and organisms: all “systems” adapt (or in some cases innovate) to cope with their environment in order to improve their efficiency in the struggle for survival.

DAVID: such complex organization requires design in my view. Our eyes don't mimic cameras, they mimic our eyes

Our eyes certainly came before cameras, so if anything, cameras imitate our eyes! I agree with the logic of the design argument, as does the theory that intelligent cells – possibly designed by your God – did the designing. (I don’t understand your last comment. Our eyes ARE our eyes!)