Logic and evolution (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, July 06, 2016, 18:19 (3060 days ago) @ dhw

dhw; I don't know how being open to a possibility makes it a probability. My own mindset is “God is as possible as no-God”. And you still haven't explained why your belief makes your interpretation of God's intentions less shaky than mine. Perhaps you would like to withdraw this non sequitur instead of talking round it!-I'm not talking, around it. We never get past the point of chance vs. design. You have not really offered a third way for designed organisms to appear, but have proposed that God might have given organisms a way to do it. So really for a proposed designer we both always come back to God. Which means you have a mental road block in fully accepting the idea that God can exist.-> Dhw (on God and Natural Selection): Does he know which ones will win? If he does, he has obviously preprogrammed them to win (or he intervenes to make sure his favourites win). If he doesn't, he is not in full control.
> DAVID: I agree with your analysis, all proper probabilities.
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> dhw: Excellent. Then we now have your agreement that God may have CHOSEN not to be in full control of evolution after all. And so he might also have CHOSEN to give organisms the freedom to work out their own means of survival/improvement. If not a “proper probability”, at the very least a “proper possibility”.-Note you've come back to God granting designer ability to organisms. That does not free you from realizing that God is in design control, because you allow God to dabble for evolutionary course correction.-> dhw: Yes, if God exists and if we believe in evolution, then God uses evolutionary processes. That doesn't mean he uses them to design every innovation and natural wonder, extant and extinct, in order to produce homo sapiens. I don't complain about the supposed facts. I only complain about your dislocated interpretation of them and your refusal to accept the possibility that your God may have used evolutionary processes to allow organisms to pursue their own means of survival/improvement (with the reservation that he could also dabble).-A proposal just as I've described above. You really can't get rid of God, but won't accept Him.-> David: Your suggestion that He is just watching the spectacle or He left is possible. One would think after all His efforts He'd hang around.[/i]
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> dhw: I agree with all of this. What doesn't fit is the higgledy-piggledy bush. The possibility that God is just watching the spectacle - apart perhaps from the odd dabble - is crucial to the theistic version of my alternative to your scenario, in which God is (or was, as there are signs of concession above) in total control.-Of course the h-p bush fits. It is the balance of nature which provides energy for evolution. Very obvious to me. Dabbling means God controls. No third way.