Miscellany (General)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 31, 2020, 23:19 (1203 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: To do WHAT by evolution? Any theist who believes in evolution will agree that God chose evolution to fulfil his purpose. That is NOT the point at issue, and that is why you force me to repeat ad nauseam your insistence that the “unknown reason” for God’s creation of life was to design H. sapiens, but that evolution means the direct design of every life form and natural wonder, 99% of which had no connection with H. sapiens. And you agree that you have no idea why he would have chosen this method to fulfil this purpose.

DAVID: And I've told you ad nauseum, God obviously uses evolution to evolve the universe, the Milky Way, the Earth, and life until He reaches His goal of humans with consciousness. and He does all by design of every stage. This is my firm unshakeable belief, based on all the evidence I have studied, starting as an agnostic.

It makes no difference where you started from or how firm and unshakeable your belief may be: both of us accept evolution as a fact, but you have no idea why, if your God’s goal was H. sapiens, he directly designed millions of life forms, natural wonders etc. that had no connection with humans or with their food supply. If you cannot find a logical reason why he would have done so, the inference has to be that this particular part of your theory may be wrong.

There is no inference on my part, that I am wrong. it is perfectly logical for God to chose to evolve humans by designing every stage. It is all your problem. For God create4s all of history.

dhw: I offer different theories to show how different methods can fit in with different “primacies”. Two of my theories (experimentation and getting new ideas as he goes along) allow for H. sapiens as your unknown “primacy”.

DAVID: You're just back to defending a humanized sort of God you envision.

dhw: I am back to offering different theories, the logic of which even you acknowledge, and although you desperately wish you had never said it, you have underlined their logic by agreeing (and why would you not agree?) that your God probably has thought patterns and emotions with some similarity to ours.

And I'll stick to obviously God uses logic we we do. As for His own emotions and other thought patterns, they are unknown to us and we both can guess that they have some similarity to ours. It still does not tell either of us why He chose to create history the way He did.

Torpor

QUOTES: "Life is hard for small animals in the wild, but they have many solutions to the challenges of their environment.”

“While it is technically possible to induce torpor in humans chemically, torpor is a very complex physiological process, and there are many aspects of it scientists still don't fully understand."

DAVID: The final comment above suggests that this process would be hard to evolve naturally. It is such an integrated and convoluted physiological process involving multiple alterations in metabolism, it must have been designed by God to have this degree of convergence in evolution.

dhw: The first quote explains the convergence, as all life forms must adapt to existing conditions or die. Similar conditions will give rise to similar solutions. In my view, the complexities involved in the different processes of adaptation definitely require design, and this can be explained by the intelligence of the cell communities of which all life forms are composed. The complexities of this mechanism itself may well be regarded as evidence for the existence of God. However – just to clarify – your comment seems to indicate that he directly designed the process of torpor itself (as opposed to the mechanism by which animals design “many solutions to the challenges of their environment”). I find this difficult to believe, especially if one applies your anthropocentric theory (as bolded above) to every survival strategy in the history of life on Earth.

Torpor aids survival in adverse circumstances. The survivors are needed in the ecosystems to which they contribute.