Genome complexity: challenges naturalism (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, September 21, 2015, 19:55 (3352 days ago) @ David Turell

I shall juxtapose sections of our exchange to bring out the continuity of the argument.-DAVID: As I wrote in 1992 in my book (two years before my first book was published) the discoveries of increasingly complex mechanisms to create and sustain life would eventually bring an end to the acceptance of Darwin's theory of evolution. This article encapsulates my thinking perfectly:http://www.evolutionnews.org/2015/07/evolutions_gran097591.html
QUOTE: “Aside from the obvious (and intriguing) challenge of understanding the enormous complexity of life's information payload, evolution purports to explain its origins.”
Dhw: No it doesn't. Darwin's theory attempts to explain how different forms of life evolved from earlier forms of life. Your author clearly hasn't read Darwin's book but has seized on the fact that atheists like to conflate the theory of evolution with the theory of abiogenesis. They are not connected. -DAVID: You miss the point entirely. The origin of life and the evolution of life are a continuity, totally, and intimately related. First life had to be prepared for the process of evolution which followed in a totally continuous fashion.-But Darwin's theory of evolution does not deal with the origin of life. It leaves that question open. However, if “the Creator” breathed life “into a few forms of life or one”, doesn't that meet your theistic requirements?
 
Dhw: Modern discoveries may well have put paid to Darwin's concept of how the process works, but that does not put paid to the theory of evolution. (My bold)-DAVID: You persist in forgetting that I believe in guided evolution. I have not accepted Darwin's theory of how it works. (My bold)-Neither of us has accepted Darwin's theory of how it works, but that does not mean an end to the acceptance of the whole theory of evolution. It means an end to acceptance of random mutations and gradualism, which we long ago agreed on. I can never forget that you believe in guided evolution, though I wonder how many of your fellow evolutionists, geneticists and biologists believe that your God guided it.-dhw: David, you have accepted common descent, and that is the bedrock of Darwin's theory. If you do not disagree with the above conclusion, then stop claiming that the theory is nearing the end of acceptance.-DAVID: The bedrock of his theory is natural selection which allows for a chance method for evolution and removes the need for guidance. His theory is at its heart passive and purposeless. I thought I've made that clear over and over.-You have. However, in Darwin's book, despite its misleading title, it is not natural selection that produces species but random mutations, which survive or perish according to non-creative natural selection. This, however, relates to the way evolution works, not to the theory that all forms of life - apart from the first - have evolved from earlier forms. (“Evolution: the process by which living organisms have developed from earlier ancestral forms” - Penguin Dictionary of Science.) If you accept that, you accept the theory of evolution, as opposed to that of separate creation.