Pre-programming evolution (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, January 22, 2015, 23:32 (3591 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: We don't know if life requires this exactness, since our conditions and our form of life are the only ones we know. There is no line of reasoning to fall apart. We don't have the knowledge to make claims either way. -But the experts claim we do know. For our type of carbon-based life the parameters must be exactly as found. You are correct in implying however, that other types of life will require different constants. 
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> dhw: 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.-> DAVID: But giving the organisms an IM is just a subsection of the design theory.
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> dhw: The origin of a possible IM is a different subject. We are dealing here with the course of evolution and your conviction that it had to be preprogrammed by your God or influenced by his dabbling. The IM hypothesis is a third option, regardless of its source. -But in my pattern of thought, the only source of an IM is God.-> 
> dhw: I keep asking you what that purpose is, but the only purpose you come up with is the production of humans. I then point out that this does not fit in with the diversity, and I suggest that maybe the diversity is due to the first cells possessing an inventive mechanism (possibly God-given) which gave them the ability to do their own inventing, e.g. the weaverbird designing its own nest. And on a Monday you will agree that an IM is possible, but on a Tuesday you will revert to preprogramming and/or dabbling. Your big picture is full of holes in the form of non sequiturs.-And that is because I have my dilemma. I am convinced humans are the purpose for all the reasons I have given. I look at what God has produced and I try to work backward to explain what I see, and your questioning has helped me come to some conclusions that you don't like, because we are working from opposite conclusions. I have accepted a God-guided evolutionary process. You accept the possibility, but keep hopping back and forth over the picket fence as the good agnostic should. -This infers a God who cannot or would not simply will stages of life into being on the spot. The Christian ID folks don't like this way of thinking. It infers God is limited in power. Well, we really don't know how powerful God is. I don't use religious teachings. Balance of nature is present, therefore it is part of the plan. Humans are present against all odds, therefore they are part of the plan. Evolution is life starting (how?), then bacteria who are still here, no real evolution until Cambrian multicellularity, and finally humans with enormous brain capacity. And you propose molecule-trading cells did all this after life got them started. There is too much planning and information required to do this. Still only chance or design. Unicellular organisms cannot invent the information necessary to create all that has been created, after the initial input of information in the start of life.