Pre-programming evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, December 28, 2014, 00:20 (3617 days ago) @ George Jelliss

George: I just came across this article which is in part about Charles Babbage and his attempts to support the idea that God was a mathematician.
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> http://thonyc.wordpress.com/2014/12/26/christmas-trilogy-part-2-computing-mathematical-... 
> It is surprising how these otherwise rational people like Babbage and Whewell could be diverted from their scientific work to try to justify their religious beliefs. Or were his arguments just tongue in cheek? This was before Darwin of course. 
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> I suppose they were swept along by the Zeitgeist, just as later in the century many otherwise scientific thinkers were diverted by Spiritualism.-George, very interesting. From the article:-"If God had created the world and all that was in it, how come the geological record clearly displayed the disappearance and appearance of different species over the ages. Whewell's solution was to invoke a caretaker God who popped in from time to time introducing new species to replace those that had died out these interventions being in the form of miracles. It is here that Babbage set out to demonstrate the superiority of a mathematical computing God.-"Babbage argued by analogy, he describes the possibility of a computer programme (not the terminology that Babbage uses by the way) that generates the natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, … up to and including 100,000,001 but then instead of producing the number 100,000,002 as expected jumps to 100,010,002, continuing the series 100,030,003; 100,060,004; 100,100,005; 100,150,006; 100,210,007 … and so forth. Babbage states that the law generating the series has changed at the jump. The expected numbers being exceeded by the series 10,000, 30,000, 60,000, 100,000, 150,000 … and so on this being the series of triangular numbers 1, 3, 6, 10, 15, … multiplied by 10,000.-"Babbage goes on to explain that the operator does not need to interfere with the calculating engine (he is of course thinking of his own Difference Engine) at this point but can pre-programme it from the beginning to make the change at the given juncture.-"Babbage was so pleased with his mathematical miracles that he included another account of them in his autobiography, Passages from the Life of a Philosopher originally published in London in 1864.-"Some readers might note a strong similarity between Babbage's argument, sketched here, for a divine pre-programmed replacement of species and the arguments of those modern Christians who accept the theory of evolution but state that this is God's method of creating the world."-It doesn't solve my dilemma, did God dabble or program from the beginning?