DILEMMAS: my position clarified (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, November 07, 2014, 13:04 (3667 days ago) @ David Turell

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.
DAVID: 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.-I keep forgetting that terms change their meanings even as we use them. I meant ‘creationist' as antithesis to ‘evolutionist': i.e. someone who rejects common descent and believes God created all species separately.
 
DAVID: 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.-You linked your latest restriction of the inventive mechanism (minor adaptations only) with the fossil record showing that Cambrian organisms arrive “full-blown, fully functional”. My point is that if you accept common descent, each new step (regardless of its initiator) would have taken place in existing, functioning organisms, so there won't be fossils of any non functional creatures. Since many species became extinct in a relatively short time, perhaps they were experiments that didn't work out, though the organisms were also full-blown and fully functional. (It will be interesting to see what else comes to light from the Precambrian period, as the appearance of some new organisms may not have been as sudden as was first thought.)
 
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.
DAVID: 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.-It depends how you define balance. The planet has survived all the catastrophes and transformations that Nature has thrown at it, but it has not remained the same. Different forms of life have dominated at different periods, and the balance has constantly changed. If we humans destroy ourselves, it will change again. But I still doubt that the world as we know it would collapse if God hadn't planned the four-generation-plus-migration life cycle of the monarch butterfly.
 
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?
DAVID: 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.-You are teasing me. One day it's “certainly possible” that the IM can do more than merely adapt, the next day it can't because God is in “total control”, the next day the universe may “run partially on its own”...In the context of theistic evolution, it's the part outside God's control that makes for the dilemma.-DAVID: 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.-No disagreement here. An IM's purpose would be to exploit new conditions to the advantage of the organism as a whole. It would follow the guidelines laid down by those conditions and by the limitations of its own potential. Your divine preprogramming or dabbling would follow the same purpose and guidelines.
 
dhw: 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.
DAVID: 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.-Mine too, when I wear my theist's hat. So we can hypothesize that God may have designed an unpredictable game that would run itself for his entertainment, or may have had a vague idea of what he wanted but had to keep messing about to achieve it, or may have set the wheels in motion and then got bored with the whole spiel and left it to its own devices. Each of these hypotheses can be squared with the world and the bush we know and with God thinking as we think. Why confine yourself, then, to the hypotheses that God set out to create humans, and has always been “in total control” (or maybe not), and deliberately preprogrammed the monarch butterfly's life cycle in order to maintain the balance of the Earth?