Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, January 11, 2017, 12:37 (2873 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Of course it is caused by intelligence, but it is the intelligence that gave the cells their automatic plans of action.
dhw: The “automatic plans of action” are the undiscovered 3.8-billion-year-old instructions which your God apparently implanted in the first cells to enable bacteria to solve every individual problem they will encounter throughout life’s history. And you state this as if it were a fact!
DAVID: What is fact is that the processes in any active cell or bacteria are highly complex and well-coordinated. To me it is obvious that such planning requires a superior mind as the source.

We agree that the complexity and coordination require intelligence. Why is it obvious that this must be in the form of a divine, undiscovered 3.8-billion-year-old computer programme or the direct intervention of your God?

David’s comment: It is my belief that the way bacteria live and work is exactly mimicked by the cells in our bodies working for us…
dhw: That is my view too: that the intelligent behaviour of bacteria is exactly mimicked by the intelligent behaviour of cells/cell communities. Most of these activities are automatic, but (a) these activities must have had an origin, which in my hypothesis is the intelligent, inventive mechanism, and (b) intelligence is brought to bear when bacteria/cell communities are confronted with problems.
DAVID: And I respond that such an inventive mechanism cannot develop by chance. It must have been provided.

I have always allowed for the mechanism to be God-given. You now appear to have accepted that the mechanism is free to make its own changes, i.e. that it is autonomous, intelligent and inventive (though your God can dabble if wants to). Thank you. In return, I concede that we do not know the extent of its inventive capabilities. That is why my explanation of evolution’s history is a hypothesis.

DAVID: Your theorizing does fit a possible interpretation of past evolution, but it still presents a tentative God who is not sure of where He is going. I view God as a very purposeful guy who know exactly where He is taking things.
dhw: In other words, your interpretation of evolution’s history is not based on that history at all, but on your preconceived ideas concerning the nature of God. However, the hypothesis of an intentional free-for-all spectacle removes the “tentativeness” you don’t like. So what is your objection to that?
DAVID: I simply don't think God was ever tentative in his use of evolutionary processes to produce the universe as it exists now with life on Earth, which He also developed by an evolutionary process. Free-for-all implies tentativeness on the part of God. You are right, I don't think God slows that degree of freedom.

There is nothing tentative about the free-for-all spectacle: your God creates a show of changing environments and life forms, the unpredictability of which is integral to the entertainment (think sport, literature, cinema). Maybe humans, the most unpredictable of all species, were dabbled. The point is that this scenario does not require us to tie ourselves in knots trying to explain why your God specifically designed different pre-whales, the monarch’s lifestyle, the weaverbird’s nest, and the parasite that gets pooped by the starling so that it can zombify the pill bug so that the pill bug gets eaten by the starling so that life can go on so that humans can evolve.