Review of Spetner's book (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, November 27, 2014, 12:38 (3649 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Thursday, November 27, 2014, 14:43

dhw: [The inventive mechanism] continued to create and modify body forms, chemical reactions and life styles as environments changed throughout evolution. Either it did so autonomously, or it automatically implemented a few billion programmes your God planted in the very first cells, or God dabbled. “Semi-autonomous” seems to me like another piece of linguistic fudge.-DAVID: 'Semiautonomous' means semi-independent as you well know. Autonomous means independent. 'Automatically implementing a billion initial programs' is what I mean by semiautonomous. It is initiating recipes, with some necessary small modifications.-More fudge. There is no autonomy of any kind if the organism automatically implements programmes. There is autonomy if the organism initiates programmes of its own. (Why have you changed programmes to “recipes”?) -dhw: You are locked into anthropocentrism, and you close your mind to alternative scenarios (even theistic ones) because you cannot bear the thought that your God might not have planned everything in advance.
DAVID: We humans are here. We are not necessary to the scheme of things. -What is “the scheme of things”? Life will go on without us, just as life has gone on without the 99% of species that have become extinct. No species is necessary to “the scheme of things”, but all the current species are “here”.

DAVID: Our primate friends don't need us and would do just fine without us. We are different in kind not degree. Tell me why I should not be anthropocentric? You must consider evolution to be a purposeless chance mechanism to believe otherwise.-All species would do just fine without us. And we can do just fine without all the extinct species, and most of those that are extant. I wonder why God specially preprogrammed the duck-billed platypus. You should be platycentric. But you have missed the point. You can still cling to your "different in kind" scenario even if evolution proceeded through an autonomous IM which God set in motion with no particular aim in mind. He could have dabbled when he saw its possibilities. The point of the IM hypothesis is not to read God's mind, but to explain how the higgledy-piggledy bush of evolution might have grown from the first living cells. “Purposeless chance mechanism”? Theistic version: God designed the mechanism to start it off, so it's not chance. Purpose? Every innovation serves to aid survival, propagation, and/or making life as enjoyable as possible for its own sake. God's purpose? To provide himself with a show, to produce art for art's sake, to conduct a scientific experiment? You can't tell me why he wanted to produce humans, so why should I have to tell you why he started evolution?