Evolution: gaps are very real (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, June 26, 2017, 13:06 (2708 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: OK, I've studied your question again of organisms in full control of all advances in evolution. I've admitted it possibly is true, but it has enormous problems for the agnostic.

Thank you for this reasoned approach. I will begin my reply by acknowledging as always that it is a hypothesis for which there is no more evidence than there is for your own.

1)If God gave a complete mechanism for evolution to all organisms, then God is really in control and exists.

I am not proposing a “complete mechanism” for evolution, but an autonomous, inventive intelligence potentially enabling individual cell communities (organisms) to restructure themselves in accordance with environmental demands or opportunities. The mechanism is not preprogrammed for any particular changes, or to fail or succeed (99% of species have died out). If God gave cell communities organisms this autonomous mechanism, yes, he exists, but no he has left “control” to the organisms themselves and the ever changing environment.

2)From a practical standpoint it implies an enormous software available from the beginning of life to accomplish eh complex planning for the gaps in evolution and its necessary responses to environmental challenges.

This criticism is applicable to your own hypothesis, but not to mine! Yours is the unbelievably enormous software for all species, lifestyles, saltations, environmental changes for the last 3.8 billion years. In mine there is no complex advance planning, but an endless sequence and variety of individual responses (successful or unsuccessful) to environmental conditions.

3)It requires that this innate mechanism create consciousness.

No, consciousness is an essential component of the mechanism which in my theistic version has been supplied by God, but this must not be equated with human self-awareness. We KNOW that other cell communities (organisms) are sentient, react to the environment, take decisions, communicate etc. These are all attributes of consciousness, and the big unanswered question is to what extent the cell communities are capable of using their consciousness to create something new. I accept your scepticism, but not your outright dismissal.

4) It ignores the obvious teleology presented by the history (Nagel). There is no need for humans to appear. The historical tiny preparations for bipedalism go back 37 million years and offer no survival advantage to explain them, but teleology does.

I do not accept your “obvious” anthropocentric teleology. There was no “need” for ANY multicellular organism to appear, since bacteria have done very nicely. There is no evidence that early “tiny preparations” for bipedalism offered no advantages. Malassé conjectures that even early hominins “may have been capable of conceptual and creative innovations”. The history shows hominins – just like pre-whales – developing stage by stage towards an optimum form. The “teleology” is survival and/or improvement. However, the theistic form of my hypothesis also leaves room for God to dabble. I do not deny that our extraordinary degree of consciousness sets us apart from our fellow animals, and I could imagine your God deciding to tweak a bit here and a bit there to get something really special. But I can’t imagine him preprogramming the first cells with the whole of evolution, including itsy-bitsy “preparations” for the one species he wanted all along.