Evolution: gaps are very real (Introduction)

by dhw, Friday, June 30, 2017, 13:05 (2704 days ago) @ David Turell

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.
DAVID: 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.

I am fully aware of the difference between adaptation and speciation, and keep emphasizing that my proposal is that the same mechanism is responsible for both: namely, that the intelligent cell communities are able to change themselves. Adaptation (which often has to be rapid) is proven, but saltatory innovation is not, which is why it remains a hypothesis.

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

Thank you. In that case, you did not answer my question, and now you have left out all the comments that followed. You wrote that “God can intervene at any time to produce a saltation”, in which case he is perfectly capable of organizing speciation in response to environmental change and without advanced planning. If he can do it, I suggest he is capable of creating a mechanism that can also do it.

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.
DAVID: Most naturalists probably avoid God in their scientific pronouncements.

And I suspect they also avoid insisting that every single species was preprogammed 3.8 billion years ago in order to keep life going until humans appeared.

dhw: 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. […]
DAVID: ...it is interesting you won't allow me blind faith in my theory. I am the one with faith!

I can hardly forbid you to have blind faith in a theory you consider senseless, but by the same token you will have to allow atheists to have blind faith in their theory too, and yet you’ve written two excellent books in an attempt to tell them why they’re wrong. Are you now saying that we should not question anyone who has blind faith in a theory? Or is it only someone with blind faith in YOUR theory that shouldn’t be questioned?