More miscellany (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, August 08, 2024, 18:29 (39 days ago) @ dhw

God’s imperfect system.

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

dhw: 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.

My claim is pure logic! Evolution means developing new forms in steps which leaves old forms behind! That is culling.

dhw: 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.

God created the evolution of life which we know as a history. If you tried to define evolution as you do in a biology class, you would get a fail.

99.9% versus 0.1%).

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.

dhw" 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.... And see above re “de novo” creation of our ancestors during the Cambrian, which means that no pre-Cambrian species were our ancestors!

99.9% + 0.1% = 100% of all that ever lived. The 99.9%c culled ancestors made the 0.1% surviving. Yes, or no?!

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

dhw: 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.

I wish you would remember my God is a selfless purposeful creator.

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.

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

OK.