Return to David's theory of evolution, purpose & theodicy (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, June 09, 2024, 16:57 (165 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Your belief that your God had to design and cull 99.9 out of 100 species irrelevant to his sole purpose is a distortion of Raup’s theory, which does not even mention your God.

DAVID: No, it is not distorted. I plug God as designer to an unchanged evolution process and suddenly 99.9% ancestors count as nothing? The surviving 0.1% were created by the 99.9% extinct. Do you deny that?

dhw: Of course I deny it, and so did you! Disregarding the exact percentages since 3.8 billion years ago (which nobody can know), the obvious example was dinosaurs. Of the 700 known species of dinosaur, only 4 (theropods) apparently led to current species (birds). The rest did not lead to any current species. Yet again, listen to yourself:

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.

dhw: One of the reasons why these discussions drag on is the fact that you keep agreeing and then disagreeing with your own agreement. Other examples are your God’s thought patterns and emotions like ours, his enjoyment of creating and interest in his creations, and the “allegory”nonsense (you agree that the question is not the meaning of words, but whether they do or don’t apply to your God). You have asked me to disregard past agreements, and so we go back over your already discredited arguments which led to your agreements in the first place.

Your dinosaur example proves my point! 700 dinosaur species became one species. Not exactly 99.9% to 0.1% but it shows how the statistics describe evolution. You forget the time issue in evolution. The 700 species of dinosaurs did not appear at once but over millions of years. The 99.9% is just a truncation of how evolution works. Several hominin and homo species appeared over six million years but only we are left. Trillions of species over time but now the current estimate is 2.16 million alive.

Evolution

dhw: I have no “convictions”. You are describing yourself, as bolded above. The question is not whether you understand Adler but whether you can defend the arguments you say he offers. You have agreed there is no “allegory” but the simple question of whether your God does or doesn’t want to be worshipped etc. If he is “all-everything”, he must be good and bad, selfish and selfless etc. Since you fully understand Adler, please tell us what else the word might mean.

DAVID: […] All everything applies to all of God's powers. I have not agreed to your use of allegory. Whether God wishes to be worshiped or not is unknown since the word worship is applied allegorically to God's wishes.

dhw: “All everything” can mean whatever you want it to mean (see above), and there is no “allegory” (see above) since the meaning of the word “worship” is 100% clear, and the question is whether he does or doesn’t want to be worshipped. As you agreed.

The word worship is clear to us at our human level, but not the God level. Yes or no?