Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Wednesday, March 01, 2017, 13:19 (2824 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: 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.

To avoid repetition, see my response under “asteroids”.

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

Intelligent exploitation of the environment is not chance, and if the intelligence was designed by God for that very purpose, again there is no chance. The “fluff” comes when you dither over the degree to which your God does or does not control the environment.

dhw: 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.
DAVID: 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.

A correction is only necessary if something goes wrong. So are you now suggesting that the carnivorous plants, the frogs, the monarch butterfly, the cuttlefish, the parasitic wasps all autonomously worked out their own means of survival but got it wrong and then God stepped in to correct them? If that is not what you mean, please tell us what you think these organisms came up with autonomously.