Different in degree or kind: EVOLUTION (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, January 10, 2015, 20:26 (3605 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Saturday, January 10, 2015, 20:32

dhw: There was no special threat that required ANY advances beyond bacteria, and so according to your argument, ALL multicellular organisms are special!
DAVID: Exactly. I accept that evolution was designed, because I believe in evolution guided by God.-Your argument was that humans were not needed, and so they must be special. I have pointed out that in that case ALL multicellular organisms are special. And you agree. We can end the discussion here. Your God (a Turellian theistic version of evolution) therefore specially created (or planned) unnecessary humans,trilobites, triceratops, monarch butterflies and the duck-billed platypus, and all of them are (in some cases were) the purpose of evolution. Later you refuse to speculate why humans should have been specially created, and since - like all multicellular organisms - the duck-billed platypus is also special, there is no point in speculating about its purpose either. The next point makes everything abundantly clear:
 
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!
DAVID: I think it led to both. -Precisely. It led to a higgledy-piggledy bush of special, unnecessary organisms, which included humans and the duck-billed platypus plus all the other multicellular wonders, extinct and extant. Your God may have made/planned ‘em all, but we don't know why. You “cannot give God human reasons for his actions”.-DAVID: 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:-Nobody can give a source, but it might be your God. He might have created an intelligent mechanism with all the information necessary for evolution. Or he might have specially created the duck-billed platypus. Or there might be some strange way in which matter generated its own intelligence, with the same result. As you have pointed out yourself, no source is mentioned in the passage you've quoted from the Wagner reviewAVID: QUOTE: "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) -I'm surprised you feel able to accept the argument that life was almost a mathematical inevitability resulting from a Darwinian evolutionary law of physics. No source or organizer here. Or does Wagner go on to say God did it?-I think I have now covered the rest of your post.