DILEMMAS: my position clarified (Evolution)

by David Turell , Wednesday, November 05, 2014, 16:05 (3669 days ago) @ dhw

dhw:As for the Cambrian, do you really expect to find fossils of non-creatures? No matter what form of evolution you believe in, if you accept common descent, you accept that living creatures are descended from other living creatures, which seems to tie in with your comment below, that “contingent evolution means one step follows another”. Perhaps, though, in the light of the above comment on the Cambrian, you are coming round to embracing creationism.-What?! I am a creationist. Is that a surprise. I believe in theistic evolution, a process in which God designed the developing complexity, in steps, not itty-bits. As for 'fossils from non-creatures', before the Cambrian everything is very simple, and then suddenly (in geologic time) very complex. This is punc-eq at its most elegant. There are pre-Cambrian fossils, more and more of them as discovery continues. I don't see your point.-> dhw: The fact that Nature's “balance” has shifted seismically throughout life's history, with millions of species going extinct, and new organisms replacing old ones, makes no difference, because that was presumably also God's plan (he is, after all, in “total control” of evolution). Until we humans came on the scene, the rebalancing depended entirely on the workings of Nature.-Nature was always in balance in the past at each step. It doesn't work if out of balance. we humans had better be very careful.-> dhw: So do you believe your God preprogrammed/directed every single environmental change, extinction and innovation, both local and global, prior to the arrival of humans?-I have no way of knowing. Only guesses I prefer. God created the universe to evolve from the BB. It may run partially on its own.-> dhw: Each individual innovation in itself requires planning, but if it is triggered by random changes in the environment, you have a mixture of chance and small-scale planning (perhaps by God, perhaps by an IM, depending on the range of its capabilities).-All planning requires the development of information. It must follow rules and guidelines to be coherent. 'Planning' always means prior design and purpose. That statement cannot be avoided. An IM must follow those rules.-> dhw:Or of course your God could have started out without a clue what he was doing, and dabbled as things developed - another mixture of chance and design. Planning entails purpose, but the sort of planning will depend on the sort of purpose. And attributing a purpose entails reading God's mind, which with your warnings against anthropomorphizing God, you would surely not advise us even to attempt.-But I do attempt it. I don't try to analyze His personality, as religions do, but if God thinks, and we are part of the universal consciousness, then we think just like He does. We plan like He plans. This has been my position all along.