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

by dhw, Friday, May 26, 2023, 08:09 (335 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You are still struggling to show your imagined God is very human like us. And you have proposed God is not all-knowing like us humans. Your weak form of God is well-described. You don't need to convince us further.

dhw: No struggle, no weakness, and the God I am imagining is not “very human” like us, but we have been given some of his thought patterns and emotions – as you have agreed is perfectly possible. Your objections do not answer my own objections to the sheer illogicality of your theory, which even labels your God’s method as inefficient, and they do not detract from the fact that even you accept that all my alternatives provide logical theistic explanations for the history of evolution.

DAVID: Stop distorting!! What I agreed to in the past is if your alternative God is accepted as highly humanized, what He does is logical. Not real support for Him.

I didn't say you supported it! And you always try to escape from the logic by exaggerating the “humanization”. Yes, all my alternatives are logical if you accept that God (if he exists) is not all-knowing, and as the debate on free will versus predestination shows, it is perfectly possible to believe in a God who does NOT know every outcome. It is also perfectly logical to believe that your God shares some of our human thought patterns and emotions, such as enjoying creating, being interested in what he creates, and enhancing the enjoyment by learning/discovering/ inventing new things. I would assume that such patterns are what is meant by his making us “in his own image”, since the latter is unlikely to refer to our physical appearance.

dhw: You are totally at a loss to explain why, being all-powerful and all-knowing, he didn’t design us and our food directly, but you refuse to consider any theory that differs from your own.

DAVID: What I can't accept is a highly humanized God who is not all-knowing.

An immaterial, eternal, sourceless God who can design a universe can hardly be called “highly humanized” just because he enjoys getting new ideas, or conducting scientific experiments. I’m always surprised that you consider this to be more human and less godlike than a God who designs a messy, cumbersome and inefficient method to fulfil his one and only purpose.

DAVID: The goal or end point of evolution produces naturally 99% non-survival. Since God chose that method, the results didn't disturb Him, as it does you.

dhw: What do you mean by “naturally”. If your God designed every species, where does Nature come into it? And how do you know your guy chose such an inefficient method and wasn’t disturbed by it, though it is perfectly possible – as I have shown – that he had a different purpose, chose a different method to achieve that purpose, and happily continued to do exactly what he wanted to do?

DAVID: I used 'naturally' as 'expected' as shown by Raup. Repeating how wonderful your human God is will not convince anyone who believes.

dhw: As “expected” by whom? Who laid down the law that says: "If thou wishest to create one species plus its food, thou must design and then get rid of 99 species out of 100 that have nothing to do with the one species plus its food”? Why do you think my wonderfully efficient designer would be less convincing than your messy, cumbersome, inefficient version?

DAVID: Anyone who know Raup's work would understand.

Then please enlighten me. If your God is the first cause, why would he have designed a system that forced him to create 99 out of 100 species that were irrelevant to his purpose, although according to you he was perfectly capable of direct creation? Your answer is usually that I should ask God, because you can’t make any sense out of your theory either, but maybe Raup has told you.

DAVID: As for which God to pick, the same wonderful diversity of life came from the evolutionary system they each used. Your guy bumbled and stumbled into humans, while my guy planned for them.

He “planned” for them by designing 99 out of 100 that had no connection with them, and he had to adapt his plans every time there was a change in environmental conditions (because he didn’t control these), and being all-knowing, he knew perfectly well that all of this was unnecessary because one day, when conditions were right, he would design our ancestors (plus food) from scratch. But you can’t see this as bumbling.