Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, June 19, 2020, 10:42 (1405 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: It is your dodge, not mine. If He uses evolution, as you agree, then the history of evolution is the evidence you should accept. Yet inexplicably you don't. Weird reasoning.

dhw: And the history of evolution shows us 3.X billion years’ worth of extinct non-human life forms etc., which you constantly dodge because you cannot explain why your all-powerful God would have directly designed them although the only thing he wanted to directly design was us.

DAVID: No dodge, just following evolution's history, as God's choice of methodology, which you accept and then don't accept. The giant existing bush provides the food energy necessary for survival, all logical.

I accept that if God exists, he must have set up the mechanisms for evolution. All bushes, existing and no longer existing, provide energy. How does that explain the above bold? And you say you’re not dodging!

DAVID: The errors are due to the high speed molecules making mistakes, not God's mistakes. Please note living biochemistry has many mistake screening backups in place, designed by God who knew mistakes would happen.

dhw: The system God invented from scratch makes mistakes. But God himself doesn’t make mistakes. He just knew that the system he had created from scratch would make mistakes. And this is not “humanizing”, whereas a God who experiments or who has new ideas as he goes along is impossible, because God always knows exactly what he’s doing and is always in control.

DAVID: All I have said is God's control of mistakes has limits.

And you ignore your own belief that God created the whole system from scratch. If the system he invented contains mistakes, who is responsible for the mistakes? I only ask because until now you’ve always insisted your God is all-powerful, all-knowing, totally in control, and any theory which suggests the contrary is “humanizing”. But making mistakes is apparently not “humanizing”.

DAVID: I've accepted your reasoning by describing it as humanized reasoning imposed on God without evidence.

dhw: There is no “evidence” to prove any of the theories, including your own.
DAVID: Absolute proof, which you always require, does not exist. Choice involves reason with evidence beyond a reasonable doubt.

It is you who complain that my alternative “humanized” hypotheses are “without evidence”. Of course there is no absolute proof, and I do not require it. But I would love to know what evidence you have “beyond a reasonable doubt” for your belief that your God directly designed 3.x billion years’ worth of non-human life forms, and that he did so although his one and only purpose was to design H. sapiens, which he could have done any way he chose.

DAVID: Once again, your version of God does not allow Him to make a choice of method.

I am not denying God’s right to do whatever he wanted! I am pointing out that YOUR version of his method to achieve YOUR version of his purpose makes no sense. And so you keep dodging the issue.

dhw: […] I am not wanting anything from God. I am wanting your explanation for a part of your theory that has no coherence. My alternative, logical explanations cover different interpretations of life’s history coupled with different interpretations of your God’s purpose. Whether these are humanized or not is irrelevant, since nobody can possibly know to what extent your God has thought patterns similar to our own.

DAVID: I agree with you. We cannot know God's exact thoughts, or His reasons for His purposes. I have my reasonable theory being careful not to apply any human reasoning to God's thoughts. It is an entirely coherent theory, because what I do is just look to what Adler and I see as his prime purpose, humans, whose arrival cannot be explained in any other way than God did it. Let me ask you, since you never offer an opinion, please explain why we are here, with both of us recognizing we evolved from apes.

A new dodge to avoid the incoherence of your theory! And if I answer, you can keep dodging by complaining that my answer “humanizes” God. Firstly, you cannot apply any sort of reasoning to your theory, whose parts are disconnected. Secondly, the complexity of all life forms, including humans, is such that you can and do argue that their arrival “cannot be explained in any other way than God did it”. The design argument is not confined to humans! And thirdly, over and over again I have offered a hypothesis - not an opinion, since I don’t even know if God exists – that if he does exist, he could have created life as a spectacle that he could watch with interest, humans offering by far the most interesting spectacle, with their vast variety of behaviours. But I have no objection to your own hypotheses, offered at different times: a painter enjoying his own paintings, wanting to have his works admired, wanting to have some sort of relationship, and one might add wanting to be worshipped, since that keeps cropping up in religious ceremonies. As for our evolving from apes, I do believe that is true. I don’t know what relevance it is supposed to have to our being God’s one and only purpose (you keep switching to “prime” purpose, but have never told us what other purposes he may have had).