Life's biologic complexity: Automatic molecular actions (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, December 04, 2016, 12:12 (2911 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I admit I'm not sure God orchestrated each environmental event. I have some regions of my theories where this is the case.

It is those regions of uncertainty that result in you having to tie yourself in knots to justify your theories. (See my final paragraph below)

dhw: And since, according to you, only God is capable of creating the innovations that have led to speciation, God is responsible for making the organisms incapable of withstanding what he now apparently quite deliberately throws at them. For some reason which has never been clear to me, you object to this reasoning.
DAVID: Explained. See above

The fact that you are not sure about some regions of your theories does not explain why you object to my reasoning.

DAVID: Perhaps you understand my interpretation of Raup now. God guided evolution and extinctions were one of His methods of control.
dhw: I understand now that you have finally decided that your God was responsible for Chixculub and all the other natural catastrophes and/or other major environmental changes, and you have finally decided that your God deliberately programmed or dabbled 99% of species in such a way that they would be incapable of withstanding what he threw at them, because – presumably – he had to create them and then get rid of them in order to produce humans. I can think of a much simpler explanation for the course of evolution!
DAVID: And what is that, which fits the facts of the history of evolution?

Thank you for accepting my summary of your current beliefs. You already know my explanation, but here yet again is the theistic version (the atheistic version, of course, substitutes chance for God as the prime cause). From the outset your God set up a system of randomly changing environments (just as humans can set up systems that produce random numbers). He endowed cells/cell communities with sentience and intelligence, whereby some would be able to cope with change by adapting, others would be able to exploit it by inventing new means of coping with it, but others would be unable to do either and would perish. This has resulted in the history of life as we know it: an ever changing spectacle of comings and goings, including mass extinctions, of adaptations, and of innovations (leading to speciation). The essence of this spectacle is unpredictability, but your God always had the option to intervene, and it is possible that he did so in the case of humans. The unpredictability of a self-conscious being would certainly enhance the spectacle.

With this scenario, there is no need to explain why the weaverbird’s nest is essential to the existence of humans, why God had to specially design and then deliberately destroy 99% of species in order to produce humans, or how God’s “total control” can be reconciled with the possibility that he does not control the environment. So please tell me what aspect of my hypothesis does NOT fit the facts of the history of evolution.