Different in degree or kind: EVOLUTION (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, January 09, 2015, 22:27 (3606 days ago) @ dhw

dhw:You now agree that design (not chance) underlies the innovations as they occur, because they all serve the purpose of improvement or survival. Let's hold onto that......-> 
> dhw: Perhaps that is why you find it so difficult to think along another line. There was no special threat that required ANY advances beyond bacteria, and so according to your argument, ALL multicellular organisms are special!-Exactly. I accept that evolution was designed, because I believe in evolution guided by God:
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> DAVID: Exactly my point with the opposite conclusion. Why life, why advancement beyond bacteria? None of this was needed. Therefore there was a designed drive to complexity. Stated clearly in my first book.
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> dhw: We agree that there was a drive to complexity - evolution proves it. But that doesn't mean the drive was designed specially to create humans! The drive led to an enormous higgledy-piggledy bush!-I think it led to both. You accept design and a drive to complexity. And if I remember correctly, you want 'intelligent cells' to come up with plans and you can't give a source or the information needed:-"These ideas suggest that evolvability and openness to innovation are features not just of life but of information itself. That is a view long championed by Schuster's sometime collaborator, Nobel laureate chemist Manfred Eigen, who insists that Darwinian evolution is not merely the organizing principle of biology but a “law of physics,” an inevitable result of how information is organized in complex systems. And if that's right, it would seem that the appearance of life was not a fantastic fluke but almost a mathematical inevitability." (From my recent post today re' Wagner's book) -> dhw: I have allowed for the possibility that God provided the mechanism that led to life and evolution. The issue here is your insistence that you know God's purpose. I pointed this out, together with its illogicality:
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> "What you are so desperately looking for is an overall purpose, and you insist that this is the production of humans. Organisms had to produce wings and fins and trunks and humps and rattles and compound eyes and strange migratory patterns and other weird and wonderful lifestyles, and go extinct by the billions, just so that we humans could walk the Earth..."-Why not. we are back to arguing about the necessary balance of nature, as part of the evolutionary process.
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> DAVID: ...Your 'purpose' is at the individual animal level and is correct. But that is small 'purpose'. My 'purpose' tries to answer why is there life and evolution at all. Same question as 'why is there anything?'.
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> dhw: We can only conjecture, but to say the purpose of life and evolution was to produce humans inevitably leads to the question what was the purpose of producing humans. I offered God's boredom as a motive, and you took it up but then hurriedly dropped it because that made God too human. .... If your cry of “purpose, purpose, purpose” denotes some grand plan, do please tell us what you think it is.-To produce humans. I view our existence is reason enough. And as I reflected, (you noted) I cannot give God human reasons for his actions.