Evolution v Creationism: guided evolution? dhw? (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, April 23, 2015, 12:27 (3500 days ago) @ David Turell
edited by dhw, Thursday, April 23, 2015, 13:04

Dhw: Your theory fits its parts, except that it's not clear how your theory fits its parts.-DAVID: It is not clear to you but it is to me, just as you have stated. God guided evolution, because only a planning mind can explain what we see. All the extraneous stuff you worry about is what we see, Accept it and return to the obvious. It has to be planned. Remember no intermediate steps, only large leaps. One must take into account all evidence, not just the confusing parts that have no rational explanation that we can reach at this time, as to why God allowed life to develop all the weird branches of the bush, such as whales, which make no sense as to why they are here.-One must take into account all the evidence for the theory, but one must ignore all the evidence that makes no sense in the light of the theory! -DAVID: Life started at sea, advanced to land, and then some mammals went back again. What kind of advancement planning is that? And you want as IM unguided to set all this up. Talk about a theory that clearly doesn't fit its parts.-The usual misunderstanding: I do not “want” anything. The wanting is done by you, because you want the evidence to fit in with your belief that God planned life for the sake of humans. You admit yourself that in that case "all the stuff we see" - the billions of galaxies, the vast variety of life forms, 99% of which are extinct - doesn't make sense. Unlike you, I have no preconceived theory to which I want to fit the evidence, and I am perfectly aware of the enormous demands on an IM, especially if it was not designed by God in the first place. I put the IM forward as a hypothesis, not a belief, and instead of the fulfilment of a pre-existing plan, it proposes continuous improvisation, experimentation, innovation, improvement, always at the level of individual organisms or groups of organisms responding to environmental change (or in many cases, failing to respond adequately). It's a scenario that explains the haphazardness of evolution but still allows for the possible existence of your God, who might be the designer of the IM and might also have intervened when he felt like it. What it doesn't explain is why your God would specifically plan the amazing complexities of the whale in order to produce humans.