DILEMMAS: A Response to DHW (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, November 16, 2014, 21:38 (3658 days ago) @ dhw


>dhw: Then you must argue that all the species, extinct and extant, including the monarch butterfly, were necessary for the existence of humans.-Not at all. I am accepting Tony's pattern approach which is similar to my pattern approach. Set the original stages in patterns, and let variation by the organisms supply the bushy look. 
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> dhw: Your dilemma lies in not knowing how much autonomy your God gave to the inventive mechanism.....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.-But I am settled on an interpretation of an inventive mechanism within guidelines. working off initial patterns. This gets rid of the dabble. I think the environment and the evolution of the universe follows physical principals, and God doesn't need to intervene. Chicxulub speeded up the appearance of mammals as dominant, but that would have eventually occurred anyway, just later.-> 
> dhw: The IM is an explanation of evolution, and I have repeatedly said the source might or might not have been your designer God. -Spetner calls the IM by another name, but he thoroughly believes in it. Our only argument is the degree of constraints on the adaptations. We still don't know how speciation occurs. Spetner doesn't accept common descent. And he is right, even though evolution looks like common descent, there is no proof of it, only appearance.-> 
> dhw: 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.-Acquiring information about one's environment is obvious, but you cannot tell me how the genome acquires new information for speciation, because that is all Darwinian pipedream, and no one knows. It is entirely a different type of information, and mutations generally subtract information, not add to it. The research studies make that quite clear, as Spetner, quoting them repeatedly points out. 
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> dhw: So you argue that amorphous energy has always been conscious!-Of course. First cause is God
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> dhw: 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.-It is not irrational that consciousness somehow appeared and it came from energy. That is the history we are dealing with. I fully doubt that natural events created consciousness, the point of Nagel's book. There must be a first cause. The stream of contingent of events must start somewhere and somehow.