More miscellany (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, August 08, 2024, 09:35 (39 days ago) @ David Turell

God’s imperfect system.

DAVID: Any evolutionary process REQUIRES culling.

dhw: There is only one known evolutionary process that has led to life and speciation. You have tried to equate it with human inventions, thereby “humanizing” your God’s method into one of inefficient trial and error, although you accuse me of “humanizing” God whenever I propose alternative explanations for the “culling”. Double standards.

DAVID: Ah, your worshiped double standards. Does any evolutionary process require culling or not? My only point.

It is not your only point! In your vain quest to justify what you call your God’s imperfect, messy, inefficient way of achieving what you say is his purpose, you claimed that he had to design and then cull 99.9% of irrelevant species because of some obscure rule that all evolutions require culling. The only other “evolutions” you can call on are human designs, which you tell us proceed by trial and error. How can you possibly compare these human forms of evolution to that of your all-powerful, all-knowing, first cause God? Why would he invent a rule for himself that demands the design and culling of 99.9% irrelevant species when he’s perfectly capable of direct, “de novo” creation (the Cambrian)? Your answer: because that’s how human evolutions work! By “trial and error”! And why do you reject such alternatives as experimentation to make new discoveries? Because that’s how humans work! Double standards, which are integral to your schizophrenic versions of your God.

99.9% versus 0.1%).

DAVID: Nutty. The 99.9% created the 0.1%!!!

dhw: How can the 99.9% have created the 0.1% if the 0.1% were NOT directly descended from them???

DAVID: Where did that come from? 99% produced the existing 0.1%.

It came from you. Please stop ignoring your own agreement!
dhw: Do you believe that we and our food are directly descended from 99.9% of all the creatures that ever lived?

DAVID: No. From 0.1% surviving.

QUOTE: Shortly after an asteroid slammed into Earth….life for non-avian dinosaurs ended, but the evolutionary story for the early ancestors of birds began.

DAVID: 696 dinosaurs became over 10,000 bird species!!!!

dhw: LIFE FOR NON AVIAN DINOSAURS ENDED. Those were the 696 species. Only 4 species of avian dinosaurs evolved into 10,000 bird species. Your schizophrenic self is now trying to turn mathematics on its head. Please take a grip.

dhw: I can hardly blame you for trying to ignore this second example of your absurd maths, but since you continue to contradict yourself, I shall continue to attack the Mr Hyde in you which refuses to acknowledge even the most obvious of blunders.

DAVID: Your blunder is wanting 100.1%. The culled 99.9% are the ancestors of the current living 0.1%, as a general summary of Raup's statistics.

Your insistence that the extinct 99.9% were all ancestors of the surviving 0.1% makes a mockery of the history of evolution as well as your own theory, which has him culling the 99.9% which were irrelevant to his one and only purpose. As explained earlier, and illustrated by the dinosaur example, a minuscule percentage of the 99.9% of extinct species were the now extinct ancestors of current species (e.g. 4 avian species of dinosaur out of 700). Your Dr Jekyll agrees, as bolded above. And see above re “de novo” creation of our ancestors during the Cambrian, which means that no pre-Cambrian species were our ancestors!

Earliest L-forms

DAVID: it is clear life appeared very early on Earth; despite the fact the early Earth was not really prepared for life to survive. This suggests to me a designer God pushing life development ahead as fast as He could.

dhw: It suggests to me that if there is a designer, he was experimenting, and learning as he went along.

DAVID: Yes, a dumb God who doesn't know what He is doing. Downgrading God as usual.

dhw: It is usually you who downgrade God by ridiculing his method of evolution as messy and inefficient. If life kept appearing and disappearing because early Earth was not really ready for it to survive, how does that come to mean that your God was in perfect control of a perfect method?

DAVID: We have discussed the imperfections.

dhw: But your schizophrenic self still insists that the imperfections denote perfection, and it still refuses to consider alternative explanations.

DAVID: Your explanations reduce God to a human form of mind.

As your Dr Jekyll agreed, it is possible that he has human attributes. Your ridicule of your God’s method as imperfect and inefficient is certainly no less humanizing than my theory that he enjoys experimenting and making new discoveries.

Origin of life

dhw: […] we are all in agreement. The origins of life remain a major mystery.

DAVID: That God did it is a reasonable theory.

dhw: Agreed, but it shifts the mystery to that of how a conscious, all-powerful mind can simply have “been” there forever, without a source.

DAVID: We have discussed the need for a first source. One exists, obviously. I accept the one that can think and design.

I know you do. Other people accept the chance theory. And others admit that they don’t know.