Return to David's theory of evolution and purpose (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, February 12, 2024, 18:53 (74 days ago) @ dhw

99.9% and 0.1%

DAVID: Remember my triangle example. The point is the start of life; the base is the present life, and the area of the triangle is the 99.9%.
My triangle represents the spreading bush. Its' area is the 99.9% ancestors.

dhw: A triangle is not a bush! A triangle joins up, and a bush spreads out. The 99.9% are not just the extinct ancestors of today’s species – they are ALL extinct species, of which only 0.1% are our ancestors.

I use the triangle which resembles a spreading bush in shape!.

DAVID: Of course, some lines were dead ends, and they part of the 99.9% Raup statistic of extinctions which led to the present surviving life.

Correct. Two days ago you wrote: “There are no dead ends!! Everything living came from the 99.9% now dead.” A direct contradiction of what you have just written, and of the quote you keep trying to avoid:

dhw: Do you believe that we and our food are directly descended from 99.9% of all creatures that ever lived?
DAVID: No. From the 0.1% surviving.

DAVID: Raup's number includes every average extinction in every line and also dead ends. DEAD ENDS WERE NOT GIVEN A SPECIAL STATISTIC.
And:
Same old distortion of Raup's statistic. Millions of species lines were not culled. What is here is exactly what God planned to be here.

dhw: I didn’t say dead ends were given a special statistic. Two days ago you denied that there were any dead ends! Current species are the 0.1% of survivors, which means that 99.9% of extinct species were dead ends. There are indeed millions of lines that were not culled. The current estimate is that there are 8.7 million species of plants and animals alive today, compared to 5000,000,000 that were “culled”. (Of course nobody can possibly know the exact figures.) That would be a percentage of 0.18 connected with us. Why would your all-powerful, one-purpose God design and cull 99.82 out of 100 species that had no connection with his purpose?

Same old complaint. You have just described how evolution works, the next new species comes from the old one. A purposeful process builds one step upon the last one, resulting in the 8.7 billion species here, with 99.9% of ancestors. Nothing was culled for NO GOOD REASON.

Purpose

DAVID: Your meander about God is from baselessness.

dhw: Each of my alternatives is based fairly and squarely on the history of evolution as we know it, and none of them impose a purpose and method on your God that could be described as “messy”, “cumbersome” or “inefficient”. Please tell us why you have denigrated your God’s work in this manner.

DAVID: Evolution is obviously cumbersome.

dhw: You’ve forgotten “messy” and “inefficient” and that you are talking about your God's work. It’s only so if you insist that he had one special purpose and kept messing it up by designing species irrelevant to his purpose. It’s none of those things if you allow him a different purpose, or if you stop insisting that he deliberately designed every irrelevant species. But you have fixed your beliefs, and refuse to consider the possibility that one or both might be wrong. You’d rather label your God’s work messy, cumbersome and inefficient.

Yes, cumbersome and inefficient bur when viewed as a purposeful design, nothing was extraneous. Your implication is God developed unnecessary species and threw them away. He simply culled/trimmed the lines He wanted to be here. I image all ecosystems in evolution were efficient and necessary.

dhw: When you used the words “recognize him”, “worship him”, “have a relationship with him”, he “enjoys”, he is “interested”, did you think to yourself that they didn’t mean recognize, worship, relationship, enjoy, interested? YOU knew what YOU meant, and if you think the words mean something else, then there is no point in using them.[…]

DAVID: Of course, we know the words meanings for us. Tell me how they apply to God. You have no answer like all of us.

dhw: So stop pretending that the words are “allegorical” and might not MEAN the same to God as they do to us. Of course none of us know what God – if he exists – is like, which is why it is totally ridiculous for you to claim that your God is all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good, and has no self-interest - although you think he wants us to worship him – and therefore cannot possibly do something because he enjoys doing it, or because he wants to make new discoveries. Your illogical and frequently contradictory beliefs have no more authority than my speculations.

These words are not what they MEAN to God as you phrase it. It is, can they describe God in any meaningful way? My image of God is totally unknown to you, based on your criticisms. I agree all of us has the right to imagine God in their own way,