DILEMMAS: A Response to DHW (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, November 16, 2014, 15:02 (3658 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Sunday, November 16, 2014, 15:53

dhw: He also produced the monarch butterfly, the tyrannosaurus, the trilobite and the duck-billed platypus against all odds of chance. Life itself is against all odds of chance. You say God thinks like us, you insist that he had a particular purpose, but when I challenge that purpose and offer you a different one, you claim I'm anthropomorphizing God!
DAVID: My background in Adler's "The Difference of Man and the Difference It Makes" is where we part ways. Life does look like a miracle, but when compared to the amazing bush, we humans stand out as something apart. Your thinking equates us with the duck-bills as just another twig. That amazing separation is what tells me His purpose [...]-So there are two things that “look like a miracle”: life and humans. I agree, and would add a huge number of other miracle look-alikes (Nature's Wonders), but in the context of evolution that still doesn't mean humans were God's aim right from the start. I'll summarize the major problems which I pointed out in my earlier post: if your God directed evolution so purposefully, leaving nothing to chance, and organisms could not control their own development, he must have specially created every species (broader though sometimes also narrower sense, as with the monarch butterfly) - whether related to humans or not - or preprogrammed the first cells 3.7 billion years ago. Then you must argue that all the species, extinct and extant, including the monarch butterfly, were necessary for the existence of humans. -DAVID: I have arrived at a conclusion that is easing the dilemma. God started life with a vast input of information on how to create the emergent phenomenon of life itself. Then patterns were setup in a basic set of organismal families, and adaptive modifications created the bush. God did put an IM into the basic mechanisms of life. The IM follows constraints in the initial information programs. Recognizing there are thousands of natural niches in nature, which must stay in balance, it is no surprise there is a bush of life with many inventive results.-Your dilemma lies in not knowing how much autonomy your God gave to the inventive mechanism. You have glossed over all my arguments, mainly through the term “adaptive modifications”. Your last sentence is a good summary of why the inventive mechanism may have INVENTED so many totally different, and also miraculous-seeming forms of life, but you exclude invention because it doesn't fit in with God preprogramming human beings into the very first cells. A dabble is feasible - but that means either he didn't know how to get to humans (hence the higgledy-piggledy), or he suddenly had a bright idea. To add to your convolutions, I forgot to mention that he would have had to preprogramme every environmental change as well.
 
dhw: I invent hypotheses that are no more and no less unreasonable than yours. If I thought one hypothesis was reasonable enough to believe in, I would climb down off my picket fence!
DAVID: Your IM hypothesis as an extension of epigenetic mechanisms is certainly reasonable. But you don't describe where the IM came from, other than to point to cooperating cells conjuring it up.-The IM is an explanation of evolution, and I have repeatedly said the source might or might not have been your designer God. The other no more/no less unreasonable hypothesis I was referring to is first cause energy evolving consciousness through matter (see below).
 
DAVID: ...there is no evidence that living forms can self-develop such a complex bundle of information. -There is plenty of evidence that living forms can (a) acquire information, and (b) use it to change various parts of themselves. We have never witnessed the formation of new species (broad sense), so we don't know how much they can change. There is no evidence of a 3.7-billion-year computer programme or of God dabbling.-DAVID: You are not consistent. Try leaving out random chance in your thinking and see what happens.
dhw: You insist that consciousness could only have been designed, and you insist that consciousness was always there. You are not consistent. Both hypotheses are beyond anyone's reasoning capacity, and you admit as much when you acknowledge that belief in conscious first cause energy is a matter of faith. So try applying reason to your faith and see what happens.
DAVID: One more time. Amorphous energy particles as a first cause have no impetus to self-organize into a designing consciousness. -So you argue that amorphous energy has always been conscious!-DAVID: You accept cause and effect, but then your initial energy proposal is chance organization into something constructive. Therefore to me your approach makes no sense. Rationally, there has to be organized energy as first cause to start any meaningful sequence, for me a universal consciousness. I don't need faith to get to that conclusion. My faith is my conclusion that I am right. No other approach makes sense to me.-I see no difference between irrational faith in energy somehow being consciously organized and irrational faith in energy somehow organizing itself into consciousness. The only rational element in both hypotheses is that consciousness exists, so it must have come into existence “somehow”. Of course you have faith that your “somehow” is right. So do atheists.