Pre-programming evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Wednesday, January 21, 2015, 19:46 (3592 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: His problem in this statement is he is presuming that Christian religions describe the true God. You see, I don't believe they can. I know I can't, but I am convinced there is a greater power. And fine tuning is one of my reasons. The dilemma I have is about intervention in evolution: either life and humans are coded from the beginning, or God had to intervene here and there. There is no way I can know which is correct. However, the evidence for design is so overwhelming I think there is a designer. Shane to the contrary.-As far as fine tuning is concerned, the whole argument seems to me as inconclusive as the so-called anthropic principle. We have life, so the conditions that have led to that life must be conducive to life. Whether other conditions might lead to other forms of life we don't know. We can say, "This is how it is", but we can't say, "This is how it had to be" because we have nothing to compare it with. -As for your dilemma, David, which relates to the subject of this thread, you have conveniently omitted the third element, which we have spent so long discussing. You don't know to what extent organisms have been left to themselves to direct the course of evolution. Our latest example of many is the weaverbird's nest, and your choice does not lie solely between pre-programming and intervention, because the third option is that the weaverbird worked out the design all by itself. You have tried to explain the higgledy-piggledy bush of evolution (which includes the weaverbird's nest etc. etc.) as being due to the need to “balance nature”, but unless the weaverbird's nest is crucial to the balance of nature and/or the production of humans, this nebulous argument falls apart. So your dilemma is not nearly as straightforward as you make it seem - and that's without even considering the unlikelihood of the first living cells having to pass on the billions of programmes necessary to produce weaverbirds' nests etc. etc. and humans.