Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, February 26, 2017, 09:24 (2827 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I think your disbelief creates a skewed thought pattern as it relates to God and his possible intentions. Of course you have every right to speculate.
dhw: Agnosticism is not disbelief (= God does not exist) but non-belief (= I can’t make up my mind whether God exists or not). There is a huge difference. ....If you can’t understand why he chose personally to design millions of life forms, lifestyles and natural wonders in order to keep life going until he could dabble with pre-human brains, or pre-humans could switch on their brain-enlargement programme, then maybe it is your own thought pattern that is “skewed”.
DAVID: Still on a picket fence must tilt your thinking. My contention that God guided evolution and chose it as a mechanism to create humans is a logical extension of my conclusion that humans were His goal.

My thinking is what stops me from tilting, which is why I am on the picket fence. This means that I am in the wrong, because either God exists or he doesn’t. However, in terms of reading a possible God’s intentions, all we can do is try to fit our theories to what we know of his creations. Since your own evolutionary theory, “tilted” by your conclusion, makes no sense to you, whereas you have admitted that mine fits in perfectly with the history of life as we know it (and even allows for a special dabble in the case of humans), I would suggest that my thought pattern is not half as skewed as yours!

dhw: Then let me try once more to pin you down: do you or do you not think it is possible that frogs and carnivorous plants designed their own methods of catching prey, or do you still insist that only your God could have preprogrammed or dabbled them?
DAVID: God did it.

You have also opted for God and against autonomous intelligence on the bee thread:
dhw: Bee behaviour: preprogrammed 3.8 billion years ago, personally dabbled by your God, or the consequence of autonomous intelligence?
DAVID: Bees are an integral part of the balance of nature. They are raised as pollinators to help in agriculture, and because of bee hive decline are in short supply right now. God may well have paid special attention to them. The complexity of their 'dances' signaling information suggests that. God obviously played a role.

I’m not questioning the importance of bees to the current balance of nature. You have now conceded on several occasions that your God may have given organisms an autonomous, intelligent, inventive mechanism, but every time I try to pin you down (the latest being frogs’ tongues, carnivorous plants and bees), you have opted for divine preprogramming or dabbling. Would you please put me out of my suspense and give me a concrete example of original, inventive design (not minor adaptations) which you think might have been produced by the autonomous, intelligent, inventive mechanism you have now agreed is possible.

DAVID: Isn't a designer required if chance won't work?
dhw: Yes. But that does not mean the designer designed every life form in order to get to humans.
DAVID: Of course what a designer does is design.

A designer can design a mechanism that could do its own designing. If your divine designer exists, this is clearly what he has done in the case of humans, unless you think he preprogrammed or dabbled every human invention. I am suggesting that he has given the same mechanism – though far more limited in scope – to other organisms.