Evolution: gaps are very real (Introduction)

by David Turell , Thursday, June 29, 2017, 17:57 (2705 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: Once more, the alternatives are chance versus design, not chance versus advanced planning. An action can be purposeful (by design) without being planned in advance, as is the case with adaptation. I am not saying that speciation is the same as adaptation.

Planning means to design for an advance. My point is the gaps in fossils require advanced design (planning) to be viable and work in the newly advanced form. I think you are playing with words. Speciation is a gap. Adaptation is the same species, slightly changed.

dhw: Then are you telling me that your God is incapable of making saltatory changes to organisms in response to environmental change, using the interventional process we have called “dabbling”? If he can do it, are you telling me that he is incapable of designing a mechanism that can do the same?

DAVID: It is my God, not your non-existent God, who produces new species with or without environmental change. Yes, it can be on autopilot.

dhw: I don’t know what you mean by “it can be on autopilot”.

"Autopilot": fully planned from the beginning, the 3.8 billion year old blueprint.

dhw: I suspect that very few naturalists would insist that the movement of pre-whales from land to water with its eight stages of saltations had to be preprogrammed by God 3.8 billion years ago.

Most naturalists probably avoid God in their scientific pronouncements.

DAVID: Creation of consciousness in the pinnacle of evolution (H. sapiens) is an obvious purpose. Its development is not explained otherwise. And you deny chance! God might want to be able to communicate with His creations.

dhw: Nice to see you humanizing your God again as you search for a motive, and I don’t have a problem with that, or with human consciousness being some kind of pinnacle, or with the denial of chance. I have even allowed for all this in my own hypothesis of cellular intelligence, with the possibility of a divine dabble. What bothers me is your blind faith in your theory that 3.8 billion years ago your God planned in advance every single species in the history of evolution, all for the sake of just one species, and he stuffed all these programmes into the very first cells. Now you’ve even dispensed with the alternative of dabbling!

it is interesting you won't allow me blind faith in my theory. I am the one with faith! I haven't done away with dabbling. I'm reconsidering its role and importance.