Misrepresenting Darwin (Evolution)

by xeno6696 , Sonoran Desert, Tuesday, September 15, 2009, 22:24 (5546 days ago) @ dhw

dhw,
> 
 If a system works, and you can't fathom out how it came into being, maybe it's your concept of design that is faulty. -
I think somewhere... an engineer just died...-> I wrote that the theist evolutionist argument was that "the whole process was set in motion by a designer (and perhaps on occasions the designer may have intervened)." You say that such a designer "is not a Designer at all, merely a lighter of the touch-paper, or setter off of avalanches." Then let me be more precise. This concept of a designer entails his/her/its devising the original molecules which were not only able to replicate, but also bore within themselves the potential for adaptation and beneficial, reproducible mutations. This potential was so enormous that eventually it led from relatively simple unconscious organisms to the astonishing complexities that go to make up the human body and mind. The latter process is acknowledged as the path followed by evolution, but for a theist it is simply not credible that those original molecules with their vast potential for change could have come into being by chance. Therefore they must have been designed. Therefore there must have been a designer. 
> 
> Darwin wrote that he was inclined to "look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance." You say this = Deism not Theism. Fair comment, and I should perhaps have said that evolution is not incompatible with theism or deism. My point was that "over and over again, atheists imply that design and evolution are somehow mutually exclusive", and I also pointed out that "the nature of such a designer is outside the parameters of the argument." A deist God is still a designer.
> 
> You quite rightly point out that we have learnt an enormous amount about the evolution of the universe and about the chemical structure of living creatures, and you say all this is part of the "ultimate truth". Again, I should have been more precise. By "ultimate truth" I mean whether there is or is not a designer/God/universal intelligence of some kind. Science has got no nearer to answering this question. All its discoveries could be interpreted as showing how Nature works, or how God works.
> -That's because science is operationally agnostic. It can't work without Occam, and God is the ultimate in non-reductive thought.

--
\"Why is it, Master, that ascetics fight with ascetics?\"

\"It is, brahmin, because of attachment to views, adherence to views, fixation on views, addiction to views, obsession with views, holding firmly to views that ascetics fight with ascetics.\"