Evolution v Creationism (Part II Responses) (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, September 14, 2014, 13:19 (3721 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

These posts are getting very long, so I'll try to answer what seem to me the most salient points. First, though, I think it's important to recognize that evolution is not an atheistic theory. Stephen Jay Gould, like Darwin himself, was an agnostic, and successive Popes have accepted evolution provided God is seen as its creator. The Rev Charles Kingsley, who captured the essence of morality with his Mrs Doasyouwouldbedoneby in The Water Babies, summed up evolution as follows: “...it is just as noble a conception of the Deity to believe that He created a few original forms capable of self-development into other and needful forms, as to believe that He required a fresh act of creation to supply the voids caused by the action of His laws.” I like the phrase “capable of self-development”, but Creationists might dislike “voids caused by the action of his laws”. My point is that the theory has been hijacked by atheists, just as Intelligent Design has been hijacked by Creationists, and neither theory should be dismissed because of its distortion by extremists. (For the same reason, we should not judge God by the actions of his followers. See also my post on "Religion: pros and cons".)-Your main objection seems to be that there's no evidence of failed experiments. I don't know how we would even recognize evidence of a failed experiment. Fossilized organs are pretty rare, and in any case something went wrong with every fossil that's ever been found, because they all died of something! You say punctuated equilibrium is “needed to explain away how the facts don't fit the theory”, but all theories are an attempt to explain the facts as we know them, and they change when the facts appear to change. Even the Catholic Church has jettisoned the theory that God created all species separately 6000 years ago.
 
Gould believes the bursts of creation are governed by random environmental changes. Your version is: “When they had fulfilled their purpose they were allowed to die off and the creatures needed for the next stage of development were created.” "Allow" is ambiguous. Does your God control environmental changes or not? If he does, and his purpose was to create humans to be “stewards of the earth”, why didn't he just fiddle around with the environment and with those creatures he deemed necessary for humans? Why have dinosaurs rule the earth for 160 million years and then kill them off? If, however, he has no control, and had to wait for the environment to be right, then clearly this would put his plans at the mercy of Gouldian chance. A problem for your teleology. You say definitely purpose. I say maybe God was happy to leave his inventive, evolutionary process to chance and see what would come of it.
 
You have taken similar patterns as evidence for Creationism. I see similar patterns as evidence for evolution. If all organisms descended from earlier organisms, of course they would inherit similar patterns. As for complexity, I have no idea which organism first came up with a brain, but I believe the human brain is more complex than that of, say, an ant, so it's not unreasonable to suppose that the first brain was less complex than ours. 
 
You seem sceptical about convergent evolution: “These creatures are NOT closely related, NOT from the same phylogenetic branch. So how could they come up with virtually identical solutions via random chance? Even intelligent cell communities can not explain this one.”-If there are similar conditions, it's perfectly feasible that organisms supplied by your God with a mechanism capable of intelligent responses will find the same solutions to cope with the same conditions. It's not random chance - it's great minds thinking alike. David would presumably say they were all preprogrammed to evolve that way.
 
You criticize the concept of the “survival of the fittest”. Fair enough. Natural selection creates nothing, and the survival of the fittest is indeed a tautology: “what survives, survives”. But that is not the issue here. The issue is whether (theistic version) God created life with single cells which could evolve to what we now know, or he created all the different species separately.
 
DHW: We all agree that there was no NEED for life to evolve beyond bacteria. -TONY: If there were no NEED, then no innovation/adaptation would have taken place, making evolution false. -A theistic answer: your God wanted more than bacteria. He wanted more complex life. And so he preprogrammed cells to evolve into different species (David's theistic evolution), or he created a mechanism enabling cell communities to invent new forms. In both cases, we see that a vast evolutionary bush expanded in accordance with God's wishes.
 
DHW: I can see that all the hypotheses concerning Evolution v Creationism make sense up to a certain point, but none of them provide what you might call a “definitive” answer. 
TONY: God driven creation DOES give a definitive answer, it is just not one that you want to hear. That is not meant as an insult, by the way, just a simple observation. -That was a misunderstanding. I meant a definitive answer as to whether Evolution or Creation is the correct theory. The rest of your post is your own version of God's intentions, and I would prefer to put that on a separate thread.