Return to David's theory of evolution, theodicy and purposes (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, November 20, 2024, 08:52 (1 day, 0 hours, 45 min. ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I have characterized them reasonably as human wishes, which is not a rejection of them, but a labelling of them.

dhw: I don’t know why we should wish that God enjoys creating and wants us to worship him, but whether they are human wishes or not, you have offered them as possible reasons for your God’s creation of life and us, and they are all “humanizations”.

DAVID: I understand that and it has to be balanced knowing that God is not human in any way.

Stop messing about with language. If your God probably/possibly has thought patterns and emotions like ours (as you believe), and if you believe that all the humanizing reasons YOU offer for his creating life and us are possible, then each of them is a way in which your God is like a human. (A better way of looking at it is that humans are in some ways like God, since he is supposed to have created us.) That does not make your God a human being.

DAVID: God's creations are emotionless for Him and God does not need to be worshipped.

dhw: Instead of your earlier statement that you have NOT rejected your own humanizations, and all our guesses are possible, you now inform us authoritatively that your God is emotionless, selfless, and does not “need” (replacing “want”) to be worshipped. It is your constant agreement (all possible) and disagreement (not possible) that result in your endless contradictions, which you acknowledge as “schizophrenic” and then deny.

dhw: You also reject my alternative theistic explanations of evolution’s constant comings and goings: a free-for-all or the result of experimentation. Why? Your answer:

DAVID: I have constantly pointed out God is omniscient, knows the future, needs no experimentation and needs no entertainment.

dhw: Pointed out? How do you know?

DAVID: It is how I imagine our God.

dhw: And what makes you so certain that your God is messy, cumbersome and inefficient?

DAVID: He used an indirect cumbersome form of evolutionary creation.

dhw: You’ve left out “inefficient”, but you don’t find it surprising than an omnipotent, omniscient God should be so inefficient. You have simply formed your theories, ignore all their illogicalities, and close your mind to any alternatives.

DAVID: You always forget God chooses for His own unknown reasons. Our imperfect view of evolution may be totally wrong for reasons God only knows.

If God exists, of course he chooses, and of course we don’t know his reasons. That is why we theorize. And then we test our theories to judge how feasible they might be. I would suggest to you that any theory which sees your God as being omnipotent and omniscient but also messy and inefficient is less likely to be true than a theory which has him doing precisely what he wants to do.

99.9% v 0.1%
dhw: Do you now agree with yourself that we are descended, not from 99% of species that ever lived but from the 0.1% survivors.

DAVID: Of course.

But back you go to the most astonishing theory of all:

DAVID: One last time. The 0.1% surviving came from the 99.9% extinct who went extinct producing the 0.1% surviving. Overall statistics.

dhw: Please remember your statement: “The 0.1% are the progeny of the 99.9%.” So now you have 99.9% of species actually dying as they gave birth to 0.1% of species.” I doubt if this revolutionary interpretation of the facts of life, let alone the history of evolution, will ever catch on.

DAVID: Your inability to picture evolution as Raup did is the problem. Just a pure statistical view: 99.9% extinctions resulted in 0.1% survivors. Forget mummies and daddies.

Of course if 99.9% are extinct we are left with 0.1% survivors! Now read YOUR absurd distortion of Raup's statistic: “the 99.9% produced the 0.1%”; “the 0.1% are the progeny of the 99.9%”. The progeny are the children! And you gave each of them 99 sets of parents from different species, who all died giving birth to them! We also wasted more time on your continuity digression. However, it’s never too late to learn: you simply have to agree with yourself that we are descended from the 0.1% of survivors, and not from the 99.9% that did not produce survivors. End of discussion.