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

by dhw, Sunday, February 18, 2024, 12:20 (277 days ago) @ David Turell

99.9% and 0.1%

DAVID: No lines were ever sacrificed., which is your premise. What God destroyed were twigs/branches of lines He trimmed away.

dhw: It’s you who say that ALL the lines were deliberately designed and culled (now "sacrificed"), including the millions of “twigs/branches” that did NOT grow into the only ones he wanted to design. Stop dodging!

DAVID: When one trims a bush, He creates specific branches reaching to the desired tips.

dhw: This is getting silly. In your theory, he creates specific branches reaching to the desired tips, but he also creates millions of branches that don’t reach the required tips, so he cuts them off. Why does he create them in the first place? You have no idea. We must ask God to explain the messy, inefficient method you impose on him.

DAVID: God chose to use this system. No further explanation is needed.

Please stop pretending that you know your God chose a system which you yourself ridicule as being messy and inefficient. If God exists, nobody knows (a) that his one and only purpose was us and our food, (b) that he individually created every species, (c) that he knew he was messing things up by inefficiently designing and then having to cull species which had nothing to do with his one and only purpose. That is all your theory, none of it is factual, and the fact that it makes no sense to you should alert you to the possibility that one or other of your beliefs might be wrong. But there is hope in the next comment:

DAVID: I can see some degree of automaticity in speciation may have created unwanted twigs.

dhw: Please explain what you mean by “automaticity” here? Do you mean that species were given the power to design themselves? Who or what would be conducting the experimentation?

DAVID: The issue is how much speciation ability organisms had in the past, if any or not.

Yes, that is one alternative. Another is the possibility that your God was experimenting.

DAVID: Following your line of thought re brilliant cell committees, that raises the possibility of an organism creating new species for God to judge. Small steps are a possibility.

I don’t know where “judgement” comes into it. Shapiro’s theory is that intelligent cells designed the “novelties” of speciation. If your God gave cells the autonomous ability to make small steps, it must have been possible for him also to give them the autonomous ability to make large steps. (See dualism for the meaning of “autonomy”.)

Purpose

dhw: I question your assumptions about his nature, which frequently contradict your own views of his nature, e.g. he wants us to worship him, but he has no self-interest.[…]

DAVID: […] we are here running the Earth. That is the true endpoint.

dhw: Please answer my question. Why do you think he wanted us to run the Earth? And why should such a plan exclude the possibility that above all else, he might want us to worship him, and to recognize his wonderful work, and even to have a relationship with him?

DAVID: He created very sentient organisms to do the job. That He wish the relationships you propose is possible. The main purpose was to create us, nothing further.

It was you who proposed that he wanted worship, recognition and a relationship! And you may well be right. They would all be very understandable motives for his creating us (if he exists). You keep telling us that your God is all-purposeful, and that his “main purpose” was to create us. But now you refuse to consider the obvious point that he must have had a purpose for wanting to create us (and for wanting us to be the dominant species in charge of the Earth). Your proposals concerning worship etc. are perfectly reasonable, but of course they are a problem for you because they run counter to your preconception of God as being without self-interest.