How children pick up a language: new review of Wolfe (Humans)

by dhw, Friday, November 04, 2016, 13:04 (2940 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Adler, born Jewish, died a Catholic and was a philosophic advisor to the Church. My comments about degree and kind are either not understood by you or you are trying to use the word 'kind' in a different context than in which I use it. I suggest you read his book. It has a powerful argument that we are very, very special, and allows one to conclude we are special creation.

dhw: That is the nub of the whole argument. I do not dispute that our vastly superior consciousness makes us very, very special. In my theistic version of evolution, I have even allowed for the possibility of dabbling. But – let me repeat – that does not mean God geared every innovation and natural wonder extant and extinct to the production of humans. And although I have allowed for dabbling, “special creation” loses all significance when you insist that every other innovation and natural wonder was also “special creation”.

DAVID: If the universe is God's creation, if life is God's creation, and humans are (wonderful for us) God's creation, these are all special creations, which do not reduce the magnificence of what we have been given as very special organisms, not required by the stresses presented to all organisms by changes in the environment. We have taken control of our own life's conditions as well as the future. No other organism has that control.

Nothing here that I disagree with. Our disagreement is not over the special nature of humans but over your interpretation of how evolution has worked throughout its history. How does our specialness come to mean that God geared every innovation and natural wonder, extant and extinct, to the production of humans (as opposed to giving organisms free rein, apart from the occasional dabble, which might include humans)? And you still haven’t told me what aspects of my OWN hypotheses fail to fit in with the history of life as we know it.