Pre-programming evolution (Evolution)

by dhw, Friday, January 23, 2015, 15:54 (3590 days ago) @ David Turell

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. 
DAVID: 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. -That is my point. It is like saying God planned to have the mosquito bite me so that I would meet my wife. Life as we know it is the result of the conditions we know. If I hadn't been bitten, I might have married someone else. If conditions hadn't been the way they are, there might have been a different form of life. You work backwards from the result and assume it all HAD to happen that way. -dhw: The IM hypothesis is a third option, regardless of its source. 
DAVID: But in my pattern of thought, the only source of an IM is God.-In this context I am not arguing about the source but am presenting an alternative (possibly theistic) option that removes the anomalies from your rigid concept of God's methods and purpose.-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.
DAVID: 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. -Unlike you, I do not work from a conclusion. The incongruities of your own are epitomized by the weaverbird example. You believe your God preprogrammed the nest, plus billions of other innovations and lifestyles which have no conceivable connection to the all-important goal of producing humans. Even you don't believe that humans would not have appeared or would disappear without the weaverbird's nest, or that nature would be unbalanced. However, you cannot stand the idea that maybe the diversity is the result of the free-for-all which marks the whole history of evolution. That doesn't fit in with your preconceived notion of God, who must have planned everything because his purpose was to create humans. 
 
DAVID: 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.-As usual you fall back on chance or design, and although you admit that we don't even know how powerful God is, you reject the possibility that he might deliberately have provided an autonomous, information-gathering, inventive mechanism which set in motion the higgledy-piggledy free-for-all that appears to characterize life's history. I'm afraid you're stuck with your weaverbird: once and for all, do you accept the possibility that it might have designed its own nest?