New Miscellany 1: theodicy, evolution and free-for-all (General)

by David Turell , Sunday, April 13, 2025, 17:09 (1 day, 21 hours, 26 min. ago) @ dhw

Evolution

DAVID: The 99.9% extinct produced the 0.1% surviving!

dhw: There you go again! It is the 0.1% of survivors that produced the species that are alive today, e.g. only 4 out of 700 dinosaur species survived to produce all the species of birds alive today. 696 died without leaving any descendants. Now please explain how species that leave no descendants can produce descendants.

DAVID: I use Raup's overall statistics. Not your myopic view of definite lines of descent.

dhw: We are both using his statistics. There are no statistics on earth to demonstrate that existing species are descended from animals that had no descendants. As you agreed and simply refuse to acknowledge, we and our food are descended from the 0.1% of survivors – in which case your inefficient version of God designed and culled 99% of species that were irrelevant to the one and only purpose you allow him to have. Please stop trying to persuade us that “lines of descent” mean that we and our food are descended from 99 out of 100 species that had no descendants!

Evolution produced 100% of everyone: it has to be 99.9% extinct and 0.1% surviving.

Designing for the future

dhw: […] yet again, if your God’s sole purpose was us plus food (which he could have created “de novo”), why would he have deliberately designed and culled 99 out of 100 of his living forms irrelevant to his purpose?

DAVID: I don't know His reasoning.

dhw: If he wanted a free-for-all (as under “theodicy”), then he would have designed the mechanisms whereby organisms produce their own means of survival (adaptations and innovations). Their survival or extinction would then depend solely on their own abilities, and you would not be left floundering with your inexplicable belief that your all-powerful God inefficiently and incompetently produced 99 out of 100 species irrelevant to the purpose you impose on him.

DAVID: Free-for-all applies to the daily struggle for survival, not design of future species.

dhw: You keep dodging the problem you have set yourself, just as you kept on dodging the theodicy problem! 1) You have no idea why your God would have designed 99 out of 100 species irrelevant to the purpose you impose on him, and so you can only ridicule him for his inefficiency (just as you ridiculed him for incompetence with your “by-product” theory concerning theodicy). But if he WANTED a free-for-all, then it would make perfect sense that all the different species would be the result of his giving them the mechanisms with which to design their own means of survival: i.e. the daily struggle for survival led to the evolution and the extinction of 99 out of 100 species. No longer an incompetent God’s inexplicable design of unwanted species, but the direct consequence of the SAME desire for the free-for-all that you have accepted above.

The biochemical design of life is so complex only a designing mind can conduct proper evolution.