Review of Spetner's book (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, November 24, 2014, 17:36 (3652 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: You claimed that “if humans are programmed in from the beginning, the environmental changes don't matter.” I am pointing out to you that if your God did not control environmental changes, he left a surprising amount to chance. Enter the comet, exit the great plan.
DAVID: Gerald Schroeder, with tongue slightly in cheek, wondered if God decided dinosaurs had lasted long enough and hurled Chicxulub. What happened was not the end of the world. Mouse-like things survived the catastrophe and we finally appeared.-True. What a stroke of luck for God and us that Chicxulub wasn't a bit bigger. That would really have ruined his carefully laid plans.-dhw: We have only disagreed when you insisted initially that the cell does not have the equivalent of a brain (the inventive mechanism), and subsequently that all the necessary information for evolution from bacteria to humans was preplanted in the first cells, apart from what was needed for minor adaptations. If there is a black hole in our knowledge, let us not imagine that we know what we do not know.-DAVID: How does one hypothesize without a degree of imagination, once chance is removed from consideration?-One doesn't. But one does not imagine that one's knowledge is such that one can dismiss a hypothesis just because it might conflict with one's preconceptions (e.g. that God planned every innovation in advance). -dhw: That does not alter the fact that it is perfectly reasonable to discuss how evolution works without having to discuss the origin of life. 
DAVID: When your personal zygote got started it created you, a very enjoyable you, from my perspective. That is a continuum. Life started and we are here. The requirements of original life set the mechanisms in place for evolution. One can conceive of a non-evolvable life, just single cells never combining. But they did, so the ability must have been built in.-That is why I have constantly stressed that the first cells must have contained the mechanisms for life, reproduction and evolution. How they got there is one question. How they work is another.-dhw: So leave Darwin and OOL out of it, and keep a nicely balanced, agnostically open mind about the range of an IM's capabilities. You know how important it is to stay balanced!
DAVID: Balanced? You have closed out possibilities. Where did life's information come from? Spontaneous generation? With only chance, law or design available to you, your choice is 'I won't choose'. Your IM is purposely very inventive and independent to avoid considering God in any meaningful way [...] I explored science and found a belief in God is highly reasonable. -The theistic version of my hypothesis is that God designed the inventive mechanism and gave it autonomy to do its own inventing, though leaving him free to dabble if and when he wished. How does that avoid considering God in any meaningful way? I do not close out any possibilities. Whereas you are desperate to exclude an autonomous inventive mechanism because you think it would conflict with your belief that God preprogrammed all evolutionary innovations 3.7 billion years ago in order to produce humans. Do you really find one hypothesis more "scientific", more "reasonable" than the other?