Return to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, January 01, 2024, 13:42 (325 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You have stated categorically that you are certain your God enjoys creating and is interested in his creations. That provides a motive for all his actions. The words “enjoy” and “interest” are not allegories.

DAVID: I said treat the meanings of the words allegorically. A standard teaching in theology by many authors.

Your usual silly word games, on a par with all-powerful means with limited powers. When you wrote that you were certain your God enjoyed creating and was interested in his creations, what did YOU mean by those words if you didn’t mean that creating gave him pleasure and he wanted to pay attention to what he had created? Please answer. (NB: an allegory is a symbol that stands for some kind of truth or moral. The words enjoy and interest don't symbolize anything!)

dhw: If your God deliberately designed different life forms, or if he deliberately gave them the means to design their own forms because his motive was to enjoy creating things, or to enjoy watching things use the talents he had given them, the process is neither blind nor left to chance. He gets what he wants – the vast and ever changing variety of life’s history. […]

DAVID: Once again you describe a God in partial control of progress.

dhw: Your all-powerful God would do what he wanted to do, and if he wanted to give freedom to his creations, he would do so. Your own examples of this are bacteria and viruses, which are free to kill us if they want to, and human free will.

DAVID: I was referring to evolutionary progress to a purposeful goal, not pursued by your humanized God.

The first of my alternative theories has him experimenting in order to find the right formula for a being in his own image. The other two alternatives have him 1) purposefully “progressing” through new ideas and discoveries, and 2) endowing his invention with the means of “progressing”. However, if you want to confine your view of evolution to “progress”, you will need to define what you mean by the term. Do you regard a mouse as progress compared to a dinosaur? You are obviously thinking only of humans, but we are descended from just 0.1% of evolution’s products. Were the other 99.9% all progressive? And if you believe in free will, we represent the supreme example of your God’s willingness to give up control. If he lets us create our own progress, what makes you so certain that he could not possibly have let cells/cell communities create their various means of survival, which for them would also signify progress compared to the threat of extinction?

DAVID: All of evolution is designed by God to create a huge population of humans controlling all of Earth and its resources. Where did the bush of life come from? Nothing is unintended. All purposely exists. Your problem is you are blind to the teleology of evolutionary processes.

dhw: Your problem is that you are blind to the fact that 99.9% of the vast bush of past life had no connection with what you claim was our God’s one and only purpose from the beginning. [...]

DAVID: What God achieved with the remaining 0.1% is what I described above. You distort evolution backwards from the result.

As usual, you ignore your own statement: “ALL OF EVOLUTION is designed to create (a huge population of ) humans"etc. No it’s not. Only 0.1% of evolution led to humans etc.

DAVID: My view of God is that He designed evolution to produce us for His own unknown reasons.

dhw: Your usual response: you can’t think of a single reason why your God should use such an illogical method to achieve the purpose you impose on him, but still you stick to it

DAVID: None of your humanizing theories remotely resemble My God.

Your God is a messy, cumbersome, inefficient designer, and you confess that you have no idea (unknown reasons) why he would choose such an absurd method to achieve the goal you impose on him. But apparently his messy, cumbersome and inefficient method of design makes him more godlike than my three alternatives, in which he does precisely what he wants to do, and achieves precisely what he wants to achieve.