Innovation and Speciation:baleen whale feeding (Evolution)

by dhw, Sunday, June 18, 2017, 13:11 (2714 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: I view it as an unexplained wonder of complexification drive under the control of God.
dhw: “Unexplained” is the operative word. Whenever you offer us these wonders, they do explain why your own anthropocentric reading of God’s mind does not make sense to you. They therefore throw wide open the door to other possible interpretations of God’s motives and methods which you automatically reject even though you admit that they fit in with the history of life as we know it. Perhaps one day you will accept the possibility that what you call your “guess” – which has in fact established itself as a dogmatic belief – might even be less likely than other guesses.
DAVID: I explain it by saying God did it. Humans as a goal makes perfect sense to me as explained in an other entry today. God and we have consciousness. And I explain the weird braches of the bush of life as balance of nature for food supply. That all makes sense to me. I have my way of explain what exists and you look for other ways as you try to understand God's reasoning in a more human way than I do.

When you say you can’t explain why God restructured the pre-whale in all its different stages, I find it difficult to accept “God did it” as an explanation. All the alternative hypotheses I have offered you allow for “God did it”. Two of them even allow for humans as “a” goal. But you insist that humans were “the goal”, and when you slip in “a” goal, I ask you what other goals he might have had, and you tell me you can’t think of any. Balance of nature simply means life goes on as long as life goes on and by your own admission has nothing to do with humans as God’s one and only purpose. Yes, I do look for alternative explanations which will cover the enormous gaps in your own. And you keep admitting that my alternatives fit in with the history of life as we know it, but you prefer to cling to an explanation which doesn’t make sense to you.

DAVID: (under “bacterial intelligence”): You want internal drives for evolutionary change. I prefer God as an external drive.

I covered this in yesterday’s post under “big brain”:
The external drive would be your dabbling. What happened to preprogramming, which is an internal “drive” implanted by your God? Unless you think he personally reaches down and presses each individual switch in each individual organism for each individual change. An internal inventive intelligence (possibly designed by your God) is my equivalent of the internal preprogramming drive, but it is autonomous and not automated. It responds adaptively or creatively to current conditions, but does not look into a crystal ball.