Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Tuesday, December 19, 2023, 08:53 (130 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Our only difference is I recognize God's purpose to produce us by His choice method of evolution, and you offer God's who don't make choices or seem to not have any goals.

According to you, his one and only goal was to produce us plus our food, and his choice of method to produce us was to produce and then cull 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with us. This you describe as messy, cumbersome and inefficient. In all my theistic alternatives, God has a very specific goal (not necessarily the same as yours) and chooses a logical method to achieve his goal.

dhw: 3) If God is all-purposeful and all-powerful, then it is logical to assume he would only design what he wished to design. So back we go to the bolded theory. You can’t think of a single reason. So either we and our food were not his one and only goal, or he was experimenting to find the right formula, or he hit on the concept of humans late on in the process, or he didn’t design every species but deliberately created a free-for-all – though leaving himself the option to dabble if he felt like it. Can you think of any other explanations?

DAVID: Number 3 is your usual attempt to tell us about a humanized directionless form of a God who doesn't know how to evolve what He thinks He might wish to evolve.

dhw: A God who designs and has to cull 99.9% species irrelevant to his purpose doesn’t sound like one who knows how to get what he wants. That’s why you call his method messy, cumbersome and inefficient. None of my alternatives are any more human than your version, none are directionless, and only the first has him not knowing how to get what he wants, but I find targeted experimentation rather more efficient than deliberately designing and having to kill off 99.9 mistakes.

DAVID: A God who could create a universe and then start life, is not then going to use the inefficient form of creating by experimentation, a method that must look for answers. (dhw’s bold)

So instead you have him deliberately designing 99.9 mistakes and then culling them – a method you call messy, cumbersome and INEFFICIENT. And of course you ignore the other alternatives.

dhw: You even believe we and our foods are descended from Cambrian species that had no precursors, thus hammering home your belief that he wasted his time designing all the life forms that preceded the Cambrian.

DAVID: Easily explained: pre-Cambrian forms developed the necessary biochemistry for Cambrian forms.

Biochemistry is common to all life forms. Evolution is the history of life forms, and if your all-powerful God only wanted us plus food right from the start and knew how to design us, why did he have to design all the pre-Cambrian forms that had no connection with us plus food? Might it be that he had to experiment first in order to “develop the necessary biochemistry”?

DAVID: God designed the huge bush of life for our use.

dhw: And 99.9% of history’s huge bush is extinct and was NOT designed for our use. Hence the question why he bothered to design it if he only wanted to design OUR bush.

DAVID: Foolish response. The 0.1% that survived is the issue. Everything on Earth is for our use.

So why did he design the 99.9% that did not lead to the 0.1% which evolved into our present bush?

DAVID: […] stop complaining about a necessary 99.9% loss from the process. It is simply a complaint God used the wrong method.

dhw: Stop dodging. I complain that you are imposing a purpose and method on your God that make him look like a bumbling idiot (though you confine yourself to terms like messy, cumbersome and inefficient.)

DAVID: Stop attacking my God. I like Him just as He is. What you view is a myopic contortion of my theology.

You know perfectly well that I’m not attacking your God but I’m attacking your illogical theories of evolution, for which you admit you can find no possible reason. There is no “myopic contortion” unless you now wish to deny that you believe your God’s only purpose was to design us and our food, and therefore he designed and culled 99.9 out of 100 species that had no connection with his purpose. Are you now withdrawing this “myopic contortion” of history? (I wish you would. )