Teleology & evolution: Stephen Talbott's take (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, June 17, 2016, 20:34 (3081 days ago) @ dhw


> dhw: A discouraging turn-around since your agreement last week to the possibility of an autonomous inventive (or complexification) mechanism.-I can imagine a complexification IM (or CM) that is programmed to produce several alternative complex mechanisms to solve changing environmental challenges. As stated then natural selection comes into play and one or more survive. -> 
> dhw:Your “complexity drive” is meaningless if your God preprogrammed or dabbled every single innovation and variation and natural wonder that makes up the bush.-I don't know that He would have to dabble, if Natural Selection found a suitable advance of complexity originating from the choices in the CM 
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> DAVID: When nature is smarter than humans in creating complex mechanisms, something brighter than humans is at work, and it is not the descendants of the original bacteria from the start of life. 
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> dhw:If you believe in common descent, even we are the descendants of the original cells, which you now think were “very likely” preprogrammed with every evolutionary development. Our many-layered consciousness has given us a capacity for invention far in advance of any other organism, but that does not mean we have a monopoly on inventive intelligence. -Just because bacteria look as if they have intelligence, doesn't mean they are intelligent, but certainly can be intelligently planned.
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> DAVID (under “bat and moth”): Those organisms are planned to look as if they have a degree of mentation.
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> Your God set out to deceive some of us humans, did he? You are not even prepared now to consider the possibility that they may look intelligent because they ARE intelligent.-I don't think God every tries to deceive, but agnostics might think so.
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> DAVID: (under “bacteria live on electrons”): What the article tells me is these bacteria have an amazing ability for adaptation, which may well have been endowed as God created them.
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> dhw: Their ability is certainly amazing, and they manifest all the signs of intelligence, which your God may well have endowed them with. But apparently he deliberately planned them to look that way, and you just happen to know they are not intelligent.-That is my view.
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> dhw: DAVID (under “Neanderthal”):
> QUOTE: “According to the new findings, published in Genetics this month, Neanderthal genomes were rife with harmful DNA that significantly reduced the species' fitness. The researchers conclude that Neanderthals were roughly 40 percent less fit than modern humans, meaning they were less likely to produce offspring.”
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> dhw: Did your God deliberately plan their harmful DNA so they would die out? And did he plan every external environmental change that destroyed his carefully planned old species or encouraged his carefully planned new species? -You know I have no way of knowing. I know He uses evolution to produce a bush of possible advanced results at all stages of evolution and very probably lets them battle it out
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> DAVID (under “Homo naledi”) The human bush has all sorts of early groups. It fits the shotgun fashion of all of evolution. This website is from a creationist source, but it accepts the great age of these fossils. I see no reason to presume, if God wanted humans, ask why the bush? All of evolution is a bush. It is God's pattern of development.
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> dhw: But it is not shotgun according to you. It is all planned! Organisms are not capable of doing anything except follow God's on-board instructions or succumb to his dabbling. Without autonomy, they are all his puppets.-No, my concept of a CM is that once turned on it can produce several varieties of programmed complexity. When it is turned on, it is at the request of the stressed or opportunistic organism (i.e.,oxygen appears) Just an attempt to explain how h-p the bush is.