Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, January 05, 2017, 11:17 (2879 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: For animals with a brain, intelligence testing is straight forward. With single celled animals, one tests intelligent planning or intelligence, either or.

dhw: 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?
DAVID: We cannot differentiate, since all we can study are the genomes that are present now.

In order to decide whether an organism – ANY organism – is intelligent, we can study their behaviour by setting them problems.

dhw: As always, you highlight complexities, which I keep acknowledging are a major argument against atheism. ...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.
DAVID: Not directly, but the appearance of teleology to reach humans is overwhelming to me.

Neither of us can find any reason why your God could not have reached humans without whale evolution, monarch migration and the weaverbird’s nest. This suggests to me that the history of evolution was NOT geared to the production of humans, although in a theistic scenario it is quite feasible that (a) they might have been dabbled as an afterthought, or (b) your God might have had some vague idea of creating a creature resembling himself in consciousness, and might have spent a few billion years experimenting. What is your objection to these scenarios?

DAVID: No, I've included the issue of dabbling. Not a perfect program from the beginning, but God stepping in to direct the changes.
dhw: 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?
DAVID: My approach assumes God is always in control to guide evolution to reach the current human form, which I believe is the final step, with no further human change. Total control means pre-planning, possible dabbling, and some degree of free-wheeling modifications edited by God as He sees fit.

Total control does not allow for freewheeling, but you have already made it plain that you cannot think of any instance in which an organism might have been left free to do its own inventive wheeling. You are again left with the personal design of vast numbers of organisms, lifestyles and natural wonders extinct and extant which you cannot link to the production of humans.

dhw:… 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?

DAVID: The reasoning I follow starts with the miraculous appearance of a universe that is fine-tuned for life, followed by one unusually specialized planet that can allow life to appear. Life appears miraculously on an inorganic planet, then modified by living matter into a very different planet. And finally that life modifies in an evolutionary pattern to produce humans who can study and partially understand the universe they live in. I'm sorry if you cannot see that the majesty of that series of events requires a master mind to drive the entire process.

So far, so good. With my theist hat on, I can accept all of this.

DAVID: Humans were always the goal. I remind you other primates were living happily eight million years ago, without an advance to us required. But it happened. End of case.

That is the point at which, with my theist hat on, I must object to the extraordinary philosophical saltation with which you make this claim, as if all the arguments against it can be glossed over. No advance to any multicellular organism – including the whale, the duckbilled platypus, the weaverbird and all the dead dinosaurs – was “required”, since bacteria have survived perfectly well. The higgledy-piggledy history of evolution makes absolutely no sense if your almighty (= in "total control") God started out with the goal of producing humans. See above for alternative scenarios.

xxx

I shall have to respond to the “conscious universe” article tomorrow, as I am now off to visit my newborn grandchildren!