Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, December 29, 2016, 18:54 (2886 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: I know this is your belief, which is why I pick on the weaverbird’s nest to show how unreasonable it is. So do you honestly believe that life would end or humans would perish without the nest?

DAVID: Of course not. But there may be long term effects we cannot understand now.

dhw: Since you believe God deliberately designed the nest, and since you are constantly criticizing me for not seeking purpose, and since you do not have a clue what your God’s purpose might have been, perhaps you might just possibly consider the option that God did NOT design the nest but endowed the bird with the intelligence to do its own designing for its own purpose, as do all nest-building birds and all home-building animals, including humans.

We both admit we have no idea why the weaverbird nest is so complex, but it is. However its complexity would test boy scout's skill in knots. Now you are suggesting God gave the bird, and you've given the idea before, the knowledge to create the nest. Probably in a layer of its genome? That type of 'intelligence' to automatically create the nest is really instructions from God to follow a plan only a mind could create. Just as in bacteria we see intelligent reactions to stimuli which must simply be implanted instructions from God. Same application of theory.

dhw: An admirable article, but you are now repeating your disbelief in an autonomous inventive mechanism. Your disbelief in a possibly God-given autonomous inventive mechanism does not make the hypothesis illogical or atheistic.

You again skip the point. Atheists like to point out the human retina as illogical, when research shows it is a wondrous design. I still maintain God is behind all complex designs. A semi-autonomous inventive mechanism for complex advances may exist, but it is highly theoretical, with no evidentiary support.

DAVID: Free-wheeling means the organisms are possibly free to invent and try out modifications, perhaps though epigenetic mechanisms, but God reviews and exerts final design formation. […]

dhw: Being possibly free to do their own inventing and trying out would require the means to do their own inventing and trying out. That freedom would therefore require an autonomous inventive mechanism, because if it was not autonomous, it would not be free. If God exists, he can dabble, which I take it is what you mean by “exerts final design formation”. How much he has dabbled throughout the history of evolution can only be a matter of conjecture, but if he preprogrammed or dabbled every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder you can think of, you leave the freewheeling inventive mechanism devoid of freedom and devoid of inventiveness. Either the mechanism is free and therefore autonomous (UNTIL it is dabbled with) or it is preprogrammed. “Semi-autonomous” is sheer weasel.

Since I think God is in full control, there is no weaseling, just theorizing what organisms might try on their own.