More Denton: Reply to David (Introduction)

by David Turell , Sunday, August 16, 2015, 18:58 (3178 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: For what? For humans? Do you honestly believe your God designed the weaverbird's nest, the spider's silk, the Monarch's lifestyle, the plover's migration, the wasp's parasitism plus all the other existing wonders you have listed for us, plus all the other wonders that have become extinct, in order to feed humans?-Everything that is animal has to eat something. These hierarchies of edibles are necessary. the energy to live has to come from somewhere. Why the lifestyles are so complex, I don't really know, but they seem to aid in survivability which is can obvious purpose. -> 
> dhw: My question concerned the implications of your earlier statement: “I don't know if God hurled Chixculub or it just happened”. I wrote: “If God hurled Chicxulub, he must have preprogrammed the survivors to survive, knowing from the start that he was going to hurl it; or it was a sudden impulse, so he did a quick dabble to ensure the survivors survived. Otherwise, he'd have lost control, wouldn't he? And his control of evolution is essential to your hypothesis.-You are now reading His mind. His 'sudden impulse' may have been safe for His plans because he knew the mouse-like survivors were fully prepared to survive.-
> dhw: But if he didn't hurl it, he had lost control anyway. Phew, lucky for the weaverbird and us that some little critter got through carrying our programmes. (This part of the discussion is all about your insistence that God controlled evolution through preprogramming and intervention. Please tell me what is wrong with any of the above.)-You have no idea any of that supposition is true. His foresight is enough.
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> dhw: It is the drift that leaves your interpretation of God's intent at the mercy of luck. That is the point of the above paragraph about Chixculub.-Again my point that God is probably fully aware of consequences.
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> dhw: How do you read intent without reading the mind? How do you separate individual choices from intent? If the individual choices don't fit in with your version of intent, maybe you have misread the intent. As above, one concrete example to be multiplied by millions: God's purpose in starting life was to produce humans, and so 3.8 billion years ago he preprogrammed a wasp to lay its eggs on the back of a spider, thereby creating a natural balance with a food chain supply of energy. It simply doesn't fit, does it?-Of course it fits. Don't lizards eat insects? And some other larger animal up the food chain eats the lizard, and eventually we reach humans who are eating something.