Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, January 13, 2017, 12:55 (2871 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Something or someone created the existing complexity. I still insist the planning has to be at the level of a brilliant mind.
dhw: So please explain how an organism can be “free” to make its own changes (which God either approves or rejects), without having its own autonomous inventive intelligence to make changes?
DAVID: God is behind all of the evolutionary process. I've agreed that organisms can make some changes through epigenetic mechanisms. But God is in final control.

In order to avoid all future misunderstandings, do you accept that the changes made by these “epigenetic mechanisms” are neither programmed nor dabbled by your God but are made autonomously, even if your God set up the mechanism in the first place, and even if he can change the changes?

dhw:You forgot to mention that you think the whole process was geared to the production of humans. I agree that if God exists, he must have set up the process of evolution, and of course the advance from bacteria entails increasing complexity. However, evolution has not provided a balance in nature supplying food for all, because 99% of species have gone extinct.
DAVID: They are extinct because evolution advances to the most complex survivors. How would you otherwise define evolution? The balance is always there, we've agreed.

No agreement. “The balance is always there” is meaningless to me. It is life that has always been there since it started. The balance is always shifting, and evolution does not advance to the most complex survivors, but to the survivors that are able to find enough food to stay alive. These survivors include the least complex organisms, such as bacteria. I would define evolution as the process by which all organisms except the first have developed from earlier organisms.

dhw: But do please untie the knots for me through just one simple example, and explain once and for all what you see as the logical connection between your God’s personal design of the weaverbird’s nest and the provision of “food for all” so that humans could evolve.

DAVID: The weaverbird is part of a niche ecosystem, in balance in nature, nothing more.

All organisms are part of their “niche ecosystem”, and it is the nest not the bird that constitutes the natural wonder, and I don’t know what you mean by “in balance in nature”. However, your response makes it clear that you cannot find any connection between the nest and the provision of “food for all” so that humans could evolve. In other words, since you can think of “nothing more”, you cannot find any reason at all why your God should programme or personally instruct the weaverbird to tie its complicated knots. So why not allow for the possibility that he didn’t do it, but that he gave the weaverbird, the wasp, the barnacle, and our now famous plagiorhyncus cylindraceus the wherewithal to do it themselves?