DILEMMAS (Evolution)

by dhw, Saturday, October 25, 2014, 18:32 (3680 days ago)

DAVID: (under "Does evolution have a purpose?") My thinking is still open and progressing under your questioning.-Then let's go on. I'm opening a new thread because the evolution one is becoming quite diffuse, and I would like to focus on the dilemma for now. Previously, you couldn't decide to what extent God preprogrammed everything, and to what extent he dabbled. The inventive mechanism seemed to have solved the problem of minor variations, but apparently God still had to dabble when evolution “wasn't following exactly the path he wanted.” You believe that path led to humans, and a mechanism that could only handle minor variations was hardly likely to put right a programme which was not delivering the bits and pieces God needed for humans.-I agree with your “pattern” idea, as also illustrated by your two posts on “Evidence for pattern development”. The common features between different types of organism simply confirm the principle of common descent. Once a “pattern” is successful, it branches out into different forms, but retains its basic structure. You've now surprised me, though, by including spider silk as one of the patterns. This is why preprogramming and purpose seem to me to go way, way beyond the bounds of credibility. You believe that the very first cells were designed to lead to humans, but also to lead to spider silk. Spider silk, then, was as special to God as humans - unless you think humans could never have evolved without it. This is just one of billions of preprogrammed patterns, all of which had to be passed down for billions of years etc. And if spider silk had not emerged from the 3.7-billion-year-old programme, you think God would have had to dabble, because the IM couldn't have done it on its own. I keep trying to hammer home the unimaginable scale of this programme, and it's becoming greater and greater.
 
We've also discussed another aspect of your dilemma, now graphically illustrated by the spider's silk: if humans were the purpose, why the vast variety and the comings and goings provided by the evolutionary bush? You wrote: “I just can't answer the issue of God's total infallibility in programming evolution.” I don't think you can resolve the issue of the great higgledy-piggledy either. Nothing quite adds up.-Here is a possible solution to both dilemmas: God set in motion an inventive mechanism that autonomously produced the great higgledy-piggledy, but he frequently dabbled in order to guide evolution either towards a predetermined goal, or towards a goal that crystallized as the process went along.
 
Out goes what surely even you must recognize as an incredibly unlikely 3.7-billion-year programme of umpteen billion innovations crammed into the first few pin-heads, and surviving unscathed as it is passed on through the billions of descendants, with all their own variations etc. etc. You can keep evolution, you can keep purpose, you can keep an overall measure of divine control (God may have dabbled to create the “patterns”), and we can explain the higgledy-piggledy bush. But unless you have God separately creating every innovation and every natural wonder (out goes evolution), you will have to give the inventive mechanism a great deal more scope that you've allowed it so far. Worth considering?