Evolution took a long time (Introduction)

by dhw, Thursday, March 02, 2017, 13:23 (2823 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: All you have described above is chance when you leave God's dabbles behind. Recognize that fluffiness in thought.
dhw: 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.
DAVID: I have to 'dither'. I have few firm beliefs . You know what I am firm about.

You are firm in your belief that God created everything for the purpose of producing humans, even though when you look at the history of evolution, it doesn’t make sense to you. This you have admitted, just as in the past you have admitted that your God may have created an autonomous inventive mechanism, but subsequently you backtrack because such arguments undermine your key belief. That basic anthropocentric premise is what leads you into all the convolutions and contradictions we are trying and failing to make sense of.

DAVID (on the meaning of autonomy): 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.
dhw: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.
DAVID: I didn't say that at all. I can't comment on each tiny step in evolution as you wish. All I can give you is God guided evolution. We do not know how much organisms can change other than the minor alterations we see in epigenetics.

But you do comment on all these tiny steps. With each example, you have insisted that God did it. If so, according to you, it can only be that the plants, frogs, butterflies, cuttlefish and wasps did it in the first “step”, but they got it wrong so God had to drop by with a “corrective dabble”. If God didn’t step in with a “corrective dabble”, then the organisms must have got it right straight away. And that means autonomy.