Back to David's theory of evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, July 20, 2020, 17:12 (1377 days ago) @ dhw

Under “Aging is built in”:

DAVID: Totally unreasonable. God cannot prevent molecular mistakes

dhw: You offer us an all-powerful God with a helpless inability to control his own invention, although amazingly we smart human beings are able to correct some of the mistakes he could not avoid. And once again, I don’t see how millions of mistaken premature deaths from the same diseases that kill old people can be called good planning.

He invented living organisms, but cannot stop molecular mistakes. Accept it.

dhw: Your “humanizing” objection to my logical alternatives is invalidated by your agreement that your God probably has thought patterns similar to ours...

DAVID: In use of logic only!! We do not know His reasons for his purposes. Still distorting!!

dhw: At this point I quoted your agreement that your God probably has thought patterns and emotions similar to ours and “beyond just simple logical thought”. I can understand your reluctance to continue the discussion on “humanizing”, and to switch to wordplay. Perhaps you will also understand that I should not be accused of distortion when I quote your own words.

That still doesn't tell us His reasoning behind His purposes.

dhw: Purposes ARE reasons!

DAVID: Not logical. There are always reasons behind purposes!! Not according to two thesaurus' I reviewed. There is conceptual thoughts that lead to purpose. I covered reason. motive and purpose, but even motive implies thought beforehand.

dhw: You claim that your God’s only reason or purpose for creating life was to create H. sapiens, and his reason or purpose for spending 3.X billion years creating millions of non-human life forms etc. was to provide food for humans who did not yet exist. Dictionary definitions: “Purpose: the reason for which anything is done, created or exists” (Encarta) “The purpose of something is the reason for which it is made or done” (Collins) Please stop playing with words and deal with the issues themselves.

To arrive at purpose one must think through all the reasons for choosing that purpose. you are trying to skip a mental step in wordplay of your own

DAVID: Having a prime goal is not a mistaken view of God. From the Big Bang on, I view it as easy to see God's purposive actions. That is my position, whether it is 'a' or 'prime'.

dhw: I did not say that God did not have a prime goal, and the distinction is not between ‘a’ and ‘prime’ but between ‘a’ and ‘the’. You play similar games on the other thread with “the prime endpoint”. This whole dispute concerns the question why, if his only purpose was to create H. sapiens, he spent 3.X billion years directly designing anything but H. sapiens in order to provide food for humans who only appeared after 99% of the other life forms and food supplies had disappeared. You have several times said that you have “no idea”. That is an agreement that you find your own theory illogical.

The bold is total distortion of my prior statements that I don't try to guess at His reasons, and I use history to tell what He did, since I view Him as in charge.

dhw: However, if your God had other goals or secondary purposes, we might be able to find a more logical explanation of evolution, so please tell us what you think the other or secondary purposes might have been.

All I can do is look at history and the extraordinary result of conscious humans. I'll ask you, are there other purposes? I don't know of any serious ones.