Logic and evolution (Introduction)

by David Turell , Friday, July 01, 2016, 18:52 (3065 days ago) @ dhw

dhw:Autonomous, inventive intelligence is a theistic alternative to your two explanations of the higgledy-piggledy bush (a 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme or direct dabbling).
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> DAVID: … saltations reek of God's activity.
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> dhw; Saltations reek of intelligence, as opposed to Darwin's chance-propelled mutations followed by natural selection. The difference between your theory and mine is that you insist on your God preprogramming or controlling every saltation, whereas I suggest that he has given organisms the intelligence to do their own designing. This is not God versus no-God, but an attempt to find a logical explanation for the higgledy-piggledy bush of evolution.-Our difference is I believe God is in full control. Your proposal does not keep Him in full control. I have suggested that He has created an IM that produced complexity for the sake of complexity and then natural selection sorts out the survivors, resulting in the h-p bush. -> dhw: You also wrote: “As with bacterial extremophiles living creatures are built to adapt to all environments. The usual issue is how does God help?” (My bold.) It would seem that "bacteria need no help", but the issue is "how God helps them". I find all this rather confusing. -I'm not confused. Bacteria have been around since the beginning and have the ability to react to all environments and become extremophiles. That had to be built in from the beginning of life. My God did that. 
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> dhw: The logic of mine is that it explains the higgledy-piggledy bush, which is caused by organisms independently pursuing their own means of survival and improvement, succeeding or failing as conditions change. Once again, that does not preclude your God, who may have given them the intelligent, inventive mechanism that drives innovation, and it does not preclude his dabbling. It simply dispenses with the illogicality of your God preprogramming or dabbling every innovation and natural wonder, extant and extinct, in order to produce humans. But I have said all along that it is a hypothesis, and I only ask that you should accept the possibility instead of dogmatically asserting that your God is always in control and therefore cannot have given organisms the intelligence to do their own inventing.-Why should I give up the thought that God always maintains control of all processes. I'm a believer. You are not. I've commented on complexity above which answers your questions about my approach.