Innovation and Speciation:baleen whale feeding (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, June 19, 2017, 21:35 (2712 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: And:
You can't have complex saltations without a crystal ball or a planning mind. The gaps Are too large for chance to accomplish.

I do not question that saltations are too large for chance to accomplish and therefore require design. That is the whole point of my cellular intelligence hypothesis – namely, that the cell communities deliberately cooperate in designing their own restructuring, as opposed to your God reaching down and fiddling around with them, or alternatively fitting them out with a 3.8-billion-year-old programme for each cooperative enterprise. (The cooperation is essential, whichever hypothesis you believe.) I also question the need for planning, if by that you mean in advance of the conditions that trigger the changes. Their intelligent (perhaps God-given) inventive intelligence would only come into play as a RESPONSE to the new opportunities. No crystal ball.

None of your illusions to cell intelligence dissuade me from the point. You cannot avoid the need for design to plan for the large changes in each new species form.

dhw: If God exists, I have no doubt that he is in charge, but you have offered us one specific hypothesis about HOW he runs the show, and I have offered you three theistic alternative "answers to how evolution works", which you appear to have forgotten (see below, just to remind you). The dispute here is not over your faith in the existence of God, or over God being in charge, but over your dogmatic faith in one particular explanation of his motives and methods which does not make sense even to you.

4 theistic hypotheses:
1 Yours: God is in charge and knows exactly what he is doing and has the one and only purpose of producing humans, to which the whole bush of life extinct and extant is inexplicably related.
2 (anthropocentric): God is in charge and knows exactly what he is doing: he is experimenting to work out how to produce a being similar to himself. This explains the ever changing bush of life extinct and extant.
3 (anthropocentric): God is in charge and knows exactly what he is doing: he is creating an ever changing spectacle of living things, and eventually he has a great idea: a being similar to himself, so he does a dabble. This explains the ever changing bush of life extinct and extant.
4 God is in charge and knows exactly what he is doing. He has created an autonomous inventive mechanism which enables organisms to pursue their own paths to survival and/or improvement. This explains the ever changing bush of life extinct and extant. (He reserves the right to dabble, and may have done so with humans.)

You have presented all of this before. It is a good summary. My reply as always is the last three are humanized inventions of what God might be, not what He is.