Goldylocks zone planet: very few must exist (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, March 12, 2017, 10:40 (2605 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You are totally missing my big picture. I have presented the idea that God uses evolutionary processes. Evolutions progress under rules of development as the universe did and still does.
dhw:For those who believe in God and evolution, of course God uses evolutionary processes which develop! The dispute between us is to what extent he planned the whole course of evolution (every solar system, every organism), to what extent his powers are limited, and to what extent he deliberately allows the evolutionary processes to go their own way.
DAVID: I have said it occurs to me He setup an evolutionary system with rules of development. this fits the pre=planning concept and then He could dabble if he had to.

DAVID: God did not look at 'experimental solar systems'.
dhw: Another of your authoritative statements. How do you know?
DAVID: I don't know, but if He set up an evolutionary system, He didn't ever have to experiment. Not authoritative if it follows the first premise.

I notice you have omitted to say that the purpose of all his plans and dabbles was to produce humans. I don’t know how “having to dabble” fits in with pre-planning but not with experimentation. Anyway, what we now have is God setting up a higgledy-piggledy system of do-it-yourself solar systems in order to produce humans, but then stepping in when the right one came along. See below for further thoughts on this.

dhw: although he knew and planned everything in advance, he may have kept discovering new limits and therefore HAVING to dabble (because his powers, but not his knowledge, may be limited) – but discovering and adapting cannot be called experimenting. All these convolutions suggest to me that your God-planned-it-all-for-humans hypothesis must at least be open to question.
DAVID: We all have questions and you are just as convoluted.

That hardly resolves the above contradictions in your hypothesis.

dhw: I neither believe nor disbelieve in God, but I have every right to question your interpretation both of his methods and of his intentions when they leave such colossal gaps. I wonder how many of your fellow theists believe that God planned every solar system and every evolutionary innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder, extant and extinct, in order to produce humans?
DAVID: You keep repeating a wrong interpretation of my theory that He set up a continuous evolutionary process for the universe that produced solar systems on its own until ours appeared. Most theists agree with the thought that God can do anything. I'm one who is not sure of that. He obviously planned for our solar system.

I didn’t know your theory was that solar systems came and went of their own accord until ours “appeared”. I thought you thought your God specifically designed ours, and I wonder why he (had to) set up a system in which solar systems autonomously created and destroyed themselves for the sake of producing humans. However, this – as you said before – provides a neat parallel to my own theistic hypothesis regarding life’s history: that he set up a system that produced all sorts of life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders which the organisms themselves autonomously created, though most of them were then destroyed, and eventually humans “appeared”, though they may have been the result of a dabble.

NB If most theists disagree with your hypothesis, you can hardly use my agnosticism as an argument against my own.