David's theory of evolution Part Two (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, January 11, 2020, 12:13 (1566 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I don't try to find a logic in the choices God obviously makes. You are the one not content with that position, but then you really don't put together all the evidence for God as I do.

I am not querying your “evidence for God”; I am querying the logic of your theory concerning your God’s purpose for creating life and evolution and his manner of achieving that purpose.

dhw: -[…] since you have raised the subject of humans, do please explain why, 3.8 billion years ago, your God decided to provide the first living cells with a programme for symbiosis between soybeans and soil fungi (or to give them private lessons) if his only desire was to design humans. [Same question concerning today’s post on roots communicating with nematodes.]

DAVID: I have explained over and over the need for econiches so all could eat over the time evolution took to reach humans, the endpoint.

And that is what makes your theory so illogical, because you keep insisting that humans were his sole purpose, he always knows how to do what he wants to do, but for unknown reasons decides to spend 3.X billion years not pursuing his purpose, and so has to preprogramme or dabble the making of and interaction between soybeans and fungi, plant roots and nematodes etc. just to keep life going until delay-time has expired.

dhw: And so you keep pretending that your inability to link your theory of God’s purpose to the actual history of life is justified by the fact that you and I are only human – i.e. your God cannot possibly think like us although “he very well could think like us”, but you happen to know that he doesn’t but he “has logic as we do”, except that you cannot understand his logic. Does it never occur to you that it might be your interpretation of the reasons for his actions that is illogical?

DAVID: Do you ever recognize how fuzzy your thinking is about my series of points: God chose to create us over time. I cannot know His reasons, nor can you.

There is nothing fuzzy about it. If God exists, he chose to create every single life form that ever lived, or to create a process that enabled his original invention to evolve autonomously into every single life form that ever lived. That does not mean he started out with the single purpose of creating us, that he wanted total control over evolution, or that even if he did have only one purpose (us) he knew how to do it from the start. These are all assumptions on your part and that is why your theory is full of "fuzzy" thinking.

DAVID: We can guess at them but as you guess with your human reasoning He turns out quite human in His desires. Where is my 'interpretation' as in your bolded above?

Explained above. You have no grounds for assuming that your God does not have human desires – or to put it differently, that we do not have desires, ideas, purposes, feelings etc. which your God has passed on to us.

DAVID: What Adler and I interpret from the appearance of humans with consciousness, it is such an amazing event we must be a goal. Our reasoning, not God's!

Yes, your human reasoning, not God’s. But I have no objection to the idea that we might be “a” goal (as opposed to "the" goal), or to Adler’s argument that our complexity is evidence for God’s existence. This discussion has nothing to do with God’s existence and only concerns your attempts to impose a purpose and method on him that simply do not fit together.

DAVID: A book by James Le Fanu asks: "Why Us". It is descriptive with no real answers, as I have no answers. Many of us are quite logical about God.

But that does not mean your personal theory of evolution is logical, as you have acknowledged in your admirably frank statement that your theory is not illogical “if one does not apply human reasoning to the actual history.” I quite understand why you are so desperate to ignore or disown unequivocal statements like this and God “very well could think like us”, but they represent lucid thinking on your part, and support my objections to your theory as clearly as anything I can ever write.