about how evolution works; with no challenge (Evolution)

by dhw, Monday, November 23, 2015, 20:06 (3286 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: The stress you referred to earlier was “advances due to stress”, i.e. the challenge of a changed environment. That relates to adaptation. Now you are switching to stress caused by innovation for the sake of improvement. Are you suggesting, then, that your whale didn't suffer any stress because God organized its transition, whereas my whale went through agonies? How do you know?-DAVID: "Know' is much too strong a word. The jumps in the whale series are a prime example of my viewpoint. God HAD to have guided this. Logically it could not have occurred by chance.-The disagreement between us is not over chance v. design, but over how jumps may have happened. The jumps in the whale series are "a prime example of my viewpoint": that existing organisms invent new ways of exploiting their environment. Each innovation results in a new “species”, but that species may also innovate. Hence eight “jumps” from land animal to whale.
 
dhw: And that's just one of the billions of programmes that had to be passed down selectively by the very first cells so that birds and cats and whales and dinosaurs and the duck-billed platypus could fulfil your God's purpose of creating humans. Ockham will be squirming in his grave.-DAVID: God and Occam are not compatible. Human reasoning and Occam are compatible. Why do you think God thinks like you do?-We are comparing two scenarios: 1) your God creating an inventive mechanism of almost infinite potential, leading to a vast variety of species, lifestyles and natural “wonders” that come and go; 2) your God preprogramming or personally inventing every single species, lifestyle and natural wonder, extinct and extant, all for the sake of one species. Neither of us knows how God thinks, and so all we can judge by is the logical power of reasoning you believe your God has given us. Which of these two scenarios seems to fit in more logically with the history of life on Earth?-(But see “Cambrian explosion” for a glimmer of hope.)