Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, February 28, 2017, 14:28 (2825 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I'm delighted you can go back and find our discussions. The problem between us is that I have general precepts which I have repeated over and over: God wanted humans. God uses evolution of the universe, Earth, and of life. He is in control except those things He either can't control or won't control, i.e., asteroids.

dhw: The problem between us is that you have a very precise precept: God, who is always in tight control (except when he isn't), wanted humans and personally designed every life form, lifestyle and natural wonder because they were all necessary (until they became unnecessary, apart from those that are still necessary) in order to keep life going until he was able to dabble with pre-humans or until they could switch on his 3.8-billion-year programme for brain enlargement which had been passed on to them by the very first living cells. Since that very precise precept doesn’t make sense to you, I repeat over and over that maybe it’s wrong.

It is your version stated above hat makes no sense. My version of what happened makes perfect sense to me. What seems to puzzle you is that I can 't precisely define the limits of God's powers, if any. We cannot know exactly what He can do and what may be limits. We are not starting from a position that God is all-powerful as religion does. That brings 'if' into play.

dhw: Maybe he gave organisms the means to go their own way, and maybe humans were the result of a dabble or the result of the evolving intelligence that your God had set in motion. Maybe. Even to you that makes sense in the light of evolutionary history, but still you insist that your non-sensical hypothesis must be true because that is what you believe.

All you have described above is chance when you leave God's dabbles behind. Recognize that fluffiness in thought.

DAVID: He either pre-planned or dabbled, probably both. He may have given organisms some freedom to try out adaptations (yes!) or phenotypic changes toward new species (an IM with His adjustment dabbles working together....possible). This is the area of your questioning, asking for some degree of exactitude, where I wander around, because I see no evidence in science to guide me. We just don't know about speciation, and Darwin is completely wrong.

dhw: Nobody knows about speciation. You wrote: “Autonomous IM's with follow up dabbles, as you've agreed, are fine.” A follow up dabble would only be necessary if something went wrong or if your God wanted to try something new. The hypothesis of an autonomous intelligent inventive mechanism (designed by your God), which you keep agreeing to and then not agreeing to, cannot be autonomous if it can ONLY work with God’s dabbling. You know the meaning of the word “autonomous” as well as I do.

Of course I know: I'm looking at your proposal as a two-step process: an autonomous change by organisms and a corrective dabble follow up as necessary, which does make it semiautonomous.