Does evolution have a purpose? (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, October 15, 2014, 15:15 (3690 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Wednesday, October 15, 2014, 15:20

dhw: I'm afraid “guidelines for advancement” mean nothing to me. Guidelines provided by the limitations of the organisms themselves and their environment are clear enough, but you seem to be talking about guidelines on how to make eyes, ears, kidneys etc. in an instruction manual that does not give instructions.-DAVID: Lets review what we are trying to do, establishing an inventive mechanism to create new species, not just minor adaptations. If God placed such a mechanism in the genome somehow and somewhere, He is going to have it do what He intends. If He was so interested in making a universe that allows life, and creates life, He is not going to give up full control over advances in evolution through speciation. -Why not? Maybe “what He intends” is a total free-for-all. You are working backwards from your assumption that his aim was to produce humans! Now consider your earlier statement: “I could assume that God invented an inventing mechanism, so He could just sit back and watch.” Stop there, and you have an explanation for the higgledy-piggledy bush, the seemingly random comings and goings, the vast variety of life forms and behaviours. By giving the mechanism complete autonomy, he provides himself with an endlessly changing spectacle. Why is this reading of his mind less permissible than your insistence that the spectacle is “Not preprogramming and not dabbling, just evolving in semi-controlled directions towards humans.” If it had to end in humans, there did have to be control, but a) that intention is what I am questioning, and b) what control could there possibly be other than preprogramming or dabbling? What is an instruction manual that doesn't give instructions?-dhw: I too see purpose in everything: survival and improvement. That explains the bush. What purpose do you see in dinosaurs and dodos if the purpose was directionality towards humans?
DAVID: Because a semi-autonomous IM makes bushiness. It is not fully directional like a laser beam. But it guides in that direction.-An autonomous IM makes bushiness. Why should it guide in that one direction? The IM has “guided” in a billion different directions, because every innovation was specifically targeted to enable organisms to see, hear, digest, swim, walk, fly... If your God did not preprogramme or dabble, but sat back and watched, he must have given the IM autonomy.-DAVID: As I've explained, God knows what He is doing and what is intended to happen.-How do you know what God knows and intends? As I've explained, since what happened was a higgledy-piggledy bush of endlessly varied life forms and modes of behaviour, why should we not assume that this free-for-all was his intention - instead of claiming that he was targeting just one species out of billions? -dhw: As above, I am suggesting it would have had two purposes: to survive, and if possible to improve. .....Hence evolution. Hence the bush. And despite our advanced intelligence and inventiveness, I would suggest we humans pursue the same two purposes. Why does this mean that the great higgledy-piggledy process was set in motion in order to create us?-DAVID: I've covered all of your objections in my above explanation. He used evolution. He set controls in the IM. It created a bush. So what, we are here to discuss it. You seem to persist in asking for explanations for God's thinking, as in that last sentence above. As I have said, I don't try to unravel his reasoning process. He did it and since life and the universe look designed, and that chance cannot have done it, I conclude He, the greater power, exists and did it. -I've covered all of your objections to my objections in the above explanation. The issue in this discussion is not whether God exists and did it, because for the sake of this particular argument I have adopted the theistic position that he does and did. I have objected only to your insistence that he set controls in the IM to guide it towards humans. Now you complain because I am offering an alternative to your anthropocentric reading of his intention which you know yourself does not explain the higgledy-piggledy bush and which has created your preprogramming/dabbling dilemma. There is no dilemma of any kind if you accept the autonomy of the IM and the idea that God invented it and then sat back and watched.-DAVID: I would like to assume He is love, and He has intense concern for each individual, but those are human assumptions, and like everything else about God, we just don't know. If one assumes that the Bible really contains His intentions, then we do know. But humans wrote both Bibles and later committees selected which chapters to include. So the bible is biased.-Is it possible that what you “would like to assume” has influenced all your thinking about evolution? This is very much a topic for the thread on “Religion: pros & cons”, which sadly fizzled out just as it was getting interesting. We need input from Tony and/or others, since you and I are sceptical about the texts and the assumptions.