Different in degree or kind: Egnor's take (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, October 09, 2016, 13:00 (2967 days ago) @ David Turell

dhw: See my response on the infant brain thread. Since you still resolutely refuse to answer my very straightforward question, let me ask you if you believe your God must either have preprogrammed or personally dabbled the transitional limbs, organs and skeletal changes of the tiktaalik roseae. - DAVID: Yes, or provided an on-board inventive mechanism with guidelines. - Earlier you mentioned the gaps between the tiktaalik and the species on either side, leading from fish to land animals: “All they have is a transitional form with big gaps in the fossil from on either side. The gradual is Darwinian assumptions! You have accepted all new species come with gaps!” And: “We know fins became legs. The comparative anatomy of bones tells us that. Because of the gaps we have no idea how or when the changes occur.” - We agree that nobody knows how many different gradations there were before fins finally became fully formed legs, or how gradual the process was. But here we do actually have a transitional form, which you think was specially designed by your God (guidelines are just another way of saying preprogrammed, the alternative being that the organism designed itself, which you refuse to consider). My hypothesis is that when fish first stepped onto dry land, they set in motion a process whereby fins turned into legs. I have no idea how long it took, or how many transitional forms there were. So far, your hypothesis is that God specially designed the one transitional form we know. Do you think he specially designed more transitional forms? Or, since we haven't found any other transitional fossils, do you think the tikki's rudimentary legs were a divinely preprogrammed/dabbled saltation from fin to rudimentary leg, and then God preprogrammed/dabbled another saltation from rudimentary to fully formed?