Theistic evolution vs. Darwinism (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, June 04, 2013, 20:08 (4190 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: If God came to you and shook your hand, you would ask Him if He was the real one. Philosophic analysis of scientific findings has to start with the available science. If everything smells of design, there must be a designer. That should be no surprise.-Dhw: The available science can offer us nothing but materials. If there "must be a designer", then it can only be some form of intelligence directing the materials themselves from within, just as the brain directs the body from within. Science has never found any other form of intelligence, let alone a universal, eternal, hidden, quantum mind that could come and shake me by the hand. It's not a bad argument for my panpsychist hypothesis. Thank you. -DAVID: No, it isn't. What science shows, as I explain it, is that there is no other explanation of the findings except design. One needs a philosophic step beyond the materialistic reports to analyze the findings and see the reasons for design.-I'm goading you with your apparent desire to start with "the available science", but I think you have once more missed the point of my panpsychist hypothesis, which SUPPORTS design ... but not your version. Instead of a single inexplicable eternal intelligence designing everything from scratch according to a master plan, I'm proposing inexplicable evolving intelligences designing everything as they go along. These are the only forms of intelligence that science knows of ... embedded in materials. You and I even agree on one such: the intelligent genome, which manipulates matter from within to create innovations (= design). We don't know how this originated, just as we don't know how your God acquired his intelligence, but we agree that the genome exists, that it is somehow involved in design, and that design builds on earlier design (= evolution). So if you want an improbable scenario that fits in with the "available science" AND with design, this is it! Your own improbable scenario explains design by bringing in an ADDITIONAL unknown power for whose actual existence the "available science" can offer no evidence.