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

by dhw, Monday, May 29, 2023, 11:49 (542 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: My God doesn't have to experiment, learn or discover! He is all-knowing while you prefer a God who is not all knowing and must experiment, learn or discover. A vast difference in Gods. Of course your God is very human, because He is just like us, not all-knowing.

dhw: All-knowing (omniscient) is another of those terms which are used without any thought of their implications. Let me list some of them for you.

I shan’t repeat the list. The Adam and Eve story will suffice.

dhw: We can take the story of Adam and Eve as a symbol for all the problems you create with your theory: he created them and the serpent, knew they would eat the apple, and knew precisely what all the terrible results would be. He knew of every evil deed that would result from his deliberate creation, but he still went ahead. This is the all-knowing, messy, cumbersome, inefficient designer you believe in. So be it.

DAVID: We are back to theodicy. God knew His system woold make mistakes and put in backup systems we can see. God could not invent a fast-moving molecular system where the molecules never would make a mistake.

Theodicy is not confined to molecules! You object to my theories because they involve a God who is not all-knowing. Neither my list nor the Adam and Eve story is limited to molecules – an all-knowing God would have known that all the evils of the world would result from his work, and since he is also all-powerful, one could only assume that he wanted what he created. You do him no favours with your “all-knowing” theory.

DAVID: God knew his limits.

Ah, so when it comes to molecules, he is not all-powerful.

DAVID: Your balancing act of good and evil, is what God obviously accepted. When molecules are free to act as well as humans with free will, bad mistakes will happen as well as deliberate evil.
And under “Cellular intelligence: the cancer problem”:
DAVID: God's DNA code is built to allow many amazing alterations with chance mutations. Cancer seems to encourage them.

Let’s substitute “cell” for “molecule”, and what do you get: cells are free to act – they have free will. Your God gave it to them. They are not programmed to do what they do. So it’s not just cancer cells that are intelligent but all cells. And if they can do bad things, they can also do good things, using their intelligence to improve their chances of survival. And oh good heavens, the code also allows amazing alterations through chance mutations. Welcome to your new part Darwin, part Shapiro God of evolution.

DAVID: I don't have to know how or why He made his choices of a creation mechanism. He chose a cumbersome system (from a human point of view) to produce a magnificent human brain, the most complex item in the universe. My God knew exactly what He was doing with His goal in plain sight for Him.

dhw: And that apparently explains why he chose to design 99 out of 100 species that had no connection with us and our brain, although he was perfectly capable of designing us and our brain directly. All my alternative theories culminate in the human brain, without being messy, cumbersome or inefficient.

DAVID: So now you accept evolution as totally efficient?

Efficiency depends on the purpose! You say it’s inefficient because you insist that your God was forced to create species that were irrelevant to his purpose. If God doesn’t exist, then the question of efficiency doesn’t even arise. If God does exist and his purpose was to create a free-for-all, or to experiment with new ideas, or to experiment with a view to finding a particular formula that would produce a particular species (plus food), then yes, in all cases he got what he wanted without having to do anything he didn’t want to do. I’d call that efficient.

dhw: You are accepting YOUR THEORY concerning what God chose to do, and YOU can’t make any sense of it. So maybe you theory is wrong!

DAVID: Once again, I don't need to make sense of it to satisfy your rigid requirements of proof of understanding. God is only partially comprehensible.

dhw: I don't require rigid proof. I only ask for a theory that makes sense. If you are happy to believe your theory that your God is the one I have described above (using your own descriptive terms) - a theory which makes no sense to you - then so be it. But please stop pretending that your inexplicable theory is the only possible truth.

DAVID: We have no 'truths', only theories of explanations using imagined Gods with varying personalities…….

Agreed. So please stop pretending that your incomprehensible theory was God’s choice which you “accept”.

DAVID: ….yours exquisitely humanized as not all-knowing.

Why “exquisitely humanized”? The all-knowing God you believe in is not only a messy, inefficient designer, but he also knows he is creating evil, carries on regardless and, despite his being all-powerful, is powerless to stop free-willed molecules and cancer cells from causing nasty accidents. Perhaps you’d like to call him “exquisitely inhuman”.