Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, January 04, 2017, 17:40 (2880 days ago) @ David Turell

Dhw: Not only do we understand only a small bit of the many layers of the genome, but we also understand only a small bit of how consciousness/intelligence works. At least it is possible to test the intelligence of organisms.
DAVID: For animals with a brain, intelligence testing is straight forward. With single celled animals, one tests intelligent planning or intelligence, either or.

In both cases, the tests relate to an organism’s ability to solve problems with which it is not normally confronted. How does one test to see if an organism has inherited a computer programme designed 3.8 billion years ago by God, or has received God's personal guidance?

dhw: Your hypothesis and mine are only “propositions of what might exist”, but we can at least try to fit these propositions to the history of evolution as we know it.

DAVID: In trying to fit in what we see in evolution we need to recognize the size of the gaps between the various stages of, for example, the series of changes from dinosaur to bird:
https://www.quantamagazine.org/20150602-dinosaurs-to-birds/
It is worth studying. Recognizing the degree of complexity leads to recognizing the need for a sophisticated mind to plan the changes. […]

As always, you highlight complexities, which I keep acknowledging are a major argument against atheism. We have no idea to what extent cell communities can do their own designing through a possibly God-given intelligence. But regardless of that issue, the complexities of dinosaurs evolving into birds, like the complexities of whale evolution, monarch migration and the blessed weaverbird's nest, do not denote that the whole of evolution was directed towards the production of humans. (See below.)

DAVID: I do not believe these critters have the mental capacity to produce their own saltations.
dhw: But you do believe that the very first cells contained programmes for every single saltation, and so for reasons you yourself cannot fathom, God personally designed all these wonders, extinct and extant, plus all bacterial adaptations throughout life’s history, in order to produce humans.
DAVID: No, I've included the issue of dabbling. Not a perfect program from the beginning, but God stepping in to direct the changes.

OK, but dabbling also means personal design. What do you mean by “not a perfect program”? Did your God make mistakes in his planning? Or are you now going back to your “freewheeling” inventive mechanism which two days ago turned out to be neither free nor inventive?

dhw: As I see it, you are forced into this disjointed pre-planning scenario because for some reason you cannot stand the thought that your God might not have had everything worked out in advance or might even have deliberately created a world that could produce the unpredictable.
DAVID: Your scenario requires organismal genetic intelligence they obviously don't have, but assumed to possibly exist. The complexity of life obviously requires meticulous planning to create life and then have it advance with increasing complexity.

What is obvious to you is not obvious to me. Once again: We do not know the source of speciation, and we do not know the extent of organismal genetic intelligence. Your two marvellous posts about chickens and ants (once again, many thanks) add to the long list of revelations concerning the intelligence of “these critters”. My proposal is a hypothesis, not an assumption. It is your “obviously don’t have…” that is an assumption. But yes to your second statement: I find it as difficult to believe that the mechanisms for life and evolution arose by chance as I do to believe in the sourceless super-consciousness we call God. However, even if I accept the God theory as a basic premise, I can still find no sense in the attempt to link the whole history of evolution to the production of a single species. Since you can’t understand the relevance of that history yourself, why can’t you accept the possibility that he did NOT plan humans right from the start?