Ch 16, A mad world (A mad world)

by David Turell , Wednesday, December 12, 2012, 15:09 (4363 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Are you suggesting that God pre-planned every single creature that had or has legs, or are you willing to stand by your earlier agreement that this happened "through the inventive intelligence" of the mechanisms for reproduction, heredity, adaptation and innovation "being brought into play when the environment allowed for such inventions"? You said then that "DNA is coded so complexly and carefully that all sorts of convergences are allowed to be tried". "Allowed to be tried" does not = pre-planning.-I've not been entirely clear it seems. Let me try again. What is pre-planned is the DNA structures, such as wrapping around histones is present in Archaea. What is being found and I believe will be entirely proven is that complex life structures besides the genome must have been present in the most ancient of living single-celled animals. Life was complex from the beginning. That is pre-planning. The complexity of the DNA genome, from the beginning allowed for the bush-like advance of evolution so that many advancing attempts could be made as natural events allowed the changes. Natural selection mediated the changes. God did not pre-plan each and every odd structure that arose. He arranged for an evolutionary process that allowed complexity to appear and become more complex, and we are the peak performance of that mechanism. Such planning in ancient life requires a self-aware intelligence because it shows teleolgic planning. All I am saying is God knew what He was doing when He started life. Your approach is a chancy God, and makes no sense at all. Pre-planning is from the beginning so that evolution flows on its own after that. I doubt any tweaking was ever needed. Of course, I am assuming a perfect planner makes a perfect plan with a perfect result.