How children pick up a language: denying Chomsky 2 (Humans)

by dhw, Monday, September 12, 2016, 12:15 (2996 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: …why single out human language or even human anatomy as “part of the evidence”? EVERY complexity is part of the evidence for you.
DAVID: Your last sentence is correct. Evidence for God is not one item or fact. It is the overall picture which encompasses all of the complexity seen in life, including the miracle of life itself.-So we can forget about “different in kind not degree” if we are only interested in proving the likelihood of God's existence and interventions.
 
Dhw: May I make a tentative suggestion? Could it be that your insistence on “difference in kind, not degree” has nothing to do with proving that humans are the product of intervention and are not the product of chance, but has everything to do with your theory that God created life in order to produce humans?... Humans must have been the purpose from the very beginning, your God has always maintained control, and any other hypothesis fails to match your own personal interpretation of his mind and modus operandi. Just a tentative suggestion to explain why you are so keen to separate one intervention from all the others.
DAVID: Your point fits my thinking completely. 'Different in kind' is just one piece of evidence, but it is a major example of how the process of evolution created the most amazing organism of all the rest. […] If the evolutionary process is thought to be adaptations to immediate stresses, our brain does not fit the pattern in any way.-Firstly, over and over again, we have agreed that the evolutionary process is NOT adaptations to immediate stresses, since that would not require life forms beyond bacteria. Hence my proposal that evolution is driven by the twin forces of survival and improvement. Secondly, I have never disagreed with the view that the process of evolution created humans, or that humans are “the most amazing organism of all the rest”. The disagreement resides in your insistence that humans were always your God's purpose, while at the same time every innovation and natural wonder has required his personal preprogramming or dabbling. In other words, the disagreement is over how the evolutionary process works. Nobody knows, but your theory simply makes no sense to me. All I can see in the history of life is one vast free-for-all, with organisms coming and going in accordance with the vagaries of environmental change. With my theist hat on, I don't even have a problem with the concept of the occasional divine dabble, which could certainly include humans. But the apparent free-for-all suggests to me that your God did NOT deliberately design every single twiddly bit on the evolutionary bush, and if he did not, that in turn suggests to me that organisms have the (possibly God-given) wherewithal to do their own designing.