causation (Introduction)

by dhw, Tuesday, June 10, 2014, 16:04 (3819 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: To stop us going round and round, first let me modify 'guides its own destiny' to add the word 'partially'. The organisms in which we have seen this certainly have a degree of adaptability, but obviously not complete control. And you are right, that does advance complexity. Does god dabble with the environment (?), I can't possibly know, but the Chicxulub crator tells us the dinosaurs were stopped in thier tracks. And that allowed evolution to progress to us. Chance or God, flip a coin.-Without Chicxulub we'd never have made it, but it's 50/50 Chance v. God. A strangely dithering, indecisive way for you to interpret your decisive, non-dithering God's way of fulfilling his pre-planned purpose. (See our exchanges under "Innovation and Speciation: pre-planning".)
 
DAVID: As for epigenetic mechanisms, yes they are in place. They add a massive degree of complexity to the genome as Shapiro demonstrates, and to my way of thinking, it implies purpose to make sure that evolution develops toward human complexity-So God (origin unknown) pre-programmed, preplanned or intervened in evolution, although organisms partially guide their own destiny. They are able to do this because God gave them mechanisms that allow them to adapt and innovate independently, but they are not able to do it independently because God wants to make sure they follow his pre-planned path towards humanity, although some of them don't, and then he deliberately makes them extinct, or they simply go extinct by chance. Except for those that survive. -Here's an alternative. Evolution has progressed from simple to complex with a vast variety of life forms because organisms have mechanisms (origin unknown) that allow them to adapt and innovate in response to random changes in the environment. Some do so successfully, and survive. Some do not, and perish.