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

by dhw, Monday, June 10, 2024, 09:27 (90 days ago) @ David Turell

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.

DAVID: 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.

What are you talking about? 696 dinosaur species became extinct with no descendants! And so according to the statistics, 99.57% of dinosaurs had no descendants, and 0.43% of dinosaurs had descendants (birds).

DAVID: 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.

The time is irrelevant! We plus our food are not descended from 99.9% of all creatures that ever lived. We and our ancestors (extinct and extant) descended from the 0.1% of creatures that ever lived. Stop disagreeing with yourself.

Evolution

DAVID: I fully understand Adler. You don’t or don’t want to since it upsets your convictions about what God may be.

dhw: I have no “convictions”. You are describing yourself, as bolded above. [Your admission that you “first choose a form of God I wish to believe in. The rest follows.”] 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.

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

Your question makes no sense. There are no “levels”. The word is our invention, and we know what it means. God is not here to tell us that our invention doesn’t mean what we invented it to mean! The question is whether what we mean by the word we invented APPLIES to him. Once more, listen to yourself:

dhw: You have accepted that it is not the meaning of the words that is in question, but their applicability to your God.

DAVID: Finally you understand.

No, finally YOU understood, and now back you go to not understanding. And this is what keeps happening. A string of contradictions, and agreements which a few days later turn into yourself disagreeing with yourself. (Examples: the dinosaur statistic; 99.9% of species didn’t lead to us plus food, but they led to us plus food; your God might want us to worship him and certainly enjoys creating and is interested in his creations, but he doesn’t and isn't because he has no self-interest; he probably/possibly has thought patterns and emotions like ours but he doesn’t because he is "certainly not human in any way"; he is all-good but is to be blamed for murderous microbes; he is perfect, omnipotent and omniscient, but imperfect and inefficient when it comes to designing the one and only thing he wants to design, etc.) Your answer? I should ignore everything you have written in the past: only your present views count. By tomorrow, your present views will be past!