Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, February 23, 2017, 11:40 (2830 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: If God guides evolution as His process to produce humans, He has to dabble. Evidence of His works is in the new design of new species, which is obvious in all of evolution that jumps huge gaps in form and function. Only a planning mind can do it
dhw: I have tried to follow through on the claim that God is “within” all things. If so, then how can things go wrong and require a “dabble”? That would mean he has to rectify his own mistakes. Corrective dabbling would only be necessary if organisms were able to do their own thing independently of God: and that means an autonomous, intelligent, inventive mechanism – a possibility which you have accepted but reject whenever it comes down to concrete examples such as carnivorous plants and the frog’s tongue, not to mention the weaverbird’s nest.
DAVID: I never said that God has to dabble when things are wrong. A dabble is pushing evolution along from where it happens to be. Dabbles are evolutionary progress, nothing else. You love organismal autonomy as if that gets rid of God. If God created life, He gave that ability to them. Fine.

I have never said that autonomy gets rid of God. It is my alternative to your own avowedly nonsensical interpretation of the evolutionary process. The problem with your on-and-off acceptance of the autonomous inventive mechanism is that so far you have not accepted one single example of its inventiveness. God always has to dabble, even to camouflage the cuttlefish, build the weaverbird’s nest, guide the monarch, and design frogs’ tongues and carnivorous plants, all so that life can go on until he can dabble with the pre-human brain, which he couldn’t have done more directly because…because…because…he couldn’t have done it more directly.