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

by dhw, Wednesday, September 18, 2024, 14:15 (64 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Any being can have patterns like us, as my dog example you’ve dismissed. You try to incorrectly humanize God.

dhw: So are you now going to accuse yourself of humanizing your dog???

You have of course ignored this example of shooting yourself in the foot. Having human attributes does not make your dog or your God human, so please stop this humanizing nonsense.

dhw: Either your God cares or he doesn’t, wants us to worship him or doesn’t, enjoys designing or doesn’t – all according to what we understand by these terms.

DAVID: Acceptable.

dhw: So please stop all this “allegory” nonsense.

DAVID: Adler touts allegorical. Who is your expert?

dhw: You have agreed with what I have just written. Adler is irrelevant. As regards experts, there are millions of believers who think their God wants us to recognize and worship him. They have built churches, synagogues, cathedrals and mosques, while priests, vicars, rabbis, imams and even scientists and theologians go there precisely for that purpose. Try telling them that your God can’t possibly want us to worship him because he is selfless.

DAVID: So you follow no expert in theology. We are not experts ourselves.

Stop dodging. There are no “experts” who can tell us what God thinks or wants, and I very much doubt whether even Adler has told you that although God might want you to worship him, he doesn’t want you to worship him because he’s selfless. The above list will contain plenty of folk who have studied theology, so please stick to the subject and stop pretending that the "experts" support your continuous flow of self-contradictions.

99.9% v 0.1%

dhw: […] I asked you for a quote to support your distortion of Raup. No quote forthcoming. Once again: when species become extinct, they cannot possibly produce anything. You agree that we and our contemporaries are descended from the 0.1% that have survived all the extinctions and not from the 99.9% of all the creatures that have ever lived, you tell us that for 3,000,000,000 years, NONE of the species were our ancestors, since these were created “de novo” by your God during the Cambrian, and you now tell us that 100% of dinosaurs failed to produce a single current descendant. And yet you go on contradicting yourself by claiming that we are descended from (were produced by) the 99.9% and not the 0.1%. Please stop it.

DAVID: Amazing. Evolution is a process in which species go extinct leaving behind advanced living species. Stop slicing the process into bits!!! Yes, there are some dead ends, but generally extinct leave descendants.

Why do you keep ignoring your own beliefs? YOU sliced evolution when you selected the Cambrian to tell us that your God designed all our ancestors “de novo”; I selected the Mesozoic for our example of the dinosaurs, who at the time only left 4 descendants out of 700 species. In your Cambrian example, the species did not leave even one descendant that would lead to the 0.1% now extant, and you have just told us that the dinosaurs didn’t leave one single descendant either. And you continue to ignore your very own agreement that the current 0.1% is NOT DESCENDED FROM ALL THE CREATURES THAT EVER LIVED BUT ONLY FROM THE 0.1% OF SURVIVORS. In other words, extinct species leave no descendants, and it is the 0.1% of survivors that evolve during the next “slice” of evolution, until the next extinction all the way through to us and our food. We have descended from the previous 0.1% of survivors. And I’m still waiting for the Raup quote which tells us that 99.9% of species “produced” the 0.1% of survivors. Previously all you told us was 99.9% losses, and 0.1% survivors.

Theodicy

DAVID: Nothing resembles a free-for-all which you desire to entertain your humanized God. Life comes with a freedom-of-action requirement. Which means free to have bad results. IT CAN'T WORK ANY OTHER WAY. Accept it.

dhw: Bugs are free to kill us, humans are free to design all sorts of evil, and “life is free to have bad results”, but nothing resembles a free-for-all! It was you who suggested that a Garden of Eden would be boring. You have also proposed that your all-powerful God is incapable of correcting all the mistakes for which you blame him (Quote: "What is fair is to blame God for natural disasters: earthquakes, terrible storms and bugs causing diseases.") and needs our help. And life can only work if there is a free-for-all. As an added bonus, this would explain all the different species that have come and gone. No more of this nonsense about your God messily and inefficiently designing and having to cull the 99.9% of species that were irrelevant to his one and only purpose of designing us and our food.

DAVID: The 99.9% provided what is on Earth today for our use through their descendants.

See above for your opposition to your own belief that we and our food are descended only from the 0.1% of survivors. This thread concerns your opposition to the concept of a free-for-all, despite your belief in freedom of action for bugs and humans and life in general with its freedom to have bad results.