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

by David Turell , Friday, October 14, 2016, 15:28 (2744 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: It is you who keep talking of tiny steps. But maybe there were. Maybe Tikki Jr had slightly more leggy legs than Tikki Sr. Who knows?
DAVID: Once again, the evidence is huge gaps, no tiny steps. We must work with the evidence we have and then hypothesize.

Tikki is new evidence of transitional forms. My hypothesis allows for all eventualities: tiny steps (improvements, as above, not changes of species), transitional forms and saltations leading to new species.

You are hypothesizing tiny steps. Fine. There is no evidence. My gaps are the evidence we have, and so I hypothesize from the only evidence we have. That is how jury trials work or logic should work.

DAVID: And your theory, sans your theistic nod to God, requires intense accurate planning to jump the gaps. Requires a mind to plan the new complex form across he gap.

dhw: Yes, my hypothesis depends on cellular intelligence (minds) to plan complex forms. You keep harping on about tiny steps and transitions and gaps, but as usual, you avoid my direct question: Do you believe your God preprogrammed/dabbled more transitional forms or a straight saltation?

Based on all the gaps, straight saltation.

DAVID: Yes they have evolved into every extreme environment. As God created life, He may well have set them up to all types of survival.

So please stop pretending it’s a simple matter of choosing between left and right. “Set them up” is yet another euphemism for preprogrammed.

Yes. I think early bacterial life came with most abilities on board.

DAVID’s comment: Put in a new cheese making environment the bacteria adapt. Did God provide this ability?

dhw: Well yes, he may have provided the first cells with a programme to pass on for bacterial cheese-making-environment adaptation (or stepped in when those pesky humans invented cheese). Alternatively, he may have given bacteria the intelligence to work out ways of gene-swapping that would enable them to adapt to all sort of environments.

The ability to gene swap required no intelligence and is an automatic ability in my view. Example: Bacteria A receives a response from Bacteria B that differs from A's inherent abilities and asks for a cooperative swap and they do it. God built it in.

dhw: Human beings have also mastered many environments. Do we do it automatically by walking left or right?
DAVID: No, no, it was our mental capacities, I agree.

dhw: Of course you do. But you cannot conceive of the possibility that your God might have given mental capacities to bacteria to do the same. Or can you?

Not cannot, but don't accept it. All bacterial responses are a molecular series of reactions to stimuli from God given capacities.

dhw: Under “molecules” you wrote, concerning the apparently intelligent behaviour of bacteria, “It may look that way to you but to me it can all be automatic.” I accepted “can be” – I am not dogmatic in my defence of my hypothesis. “Can be”, however, does allow for intelligence.

My strange use of English, 'Can be' allows one to make a choice, which I do in viewing it as automatic.

dhw: Neat return to dogmatism (no “can be” here) – statement of fact: they automatically function, i.e. God preprogrammed them all right from the start to cover every single environmental condition for the next 3.7 billion years. The theistic alternative: isn’t God’s gift of intelligence, enabling organisms to control evolution, amazing?

Simply illustrates my thought patterns.

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DAVID: The bold above is what I believe. I know you don't.

dhw: I neither believe nor disbelieve. I am an agnostic. Meanwhile, do you seriously believe God stepped in to give false vipers camouflage in order to preserve the balance of nature to provide food to keep life going so that humans could appear?

God used evolutionary processes to create humans. How is conjecture, but your question is entirely a possible way He worked. I don't believe God follows human logic in what He does.