Evolution: gaps are very real (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, July 01, 2017, 11:48 (2703 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: You are again avoiding the issue of advanced planning for major changes, which the gaps represent. Your committees must be able to envision the future form to make the plans. That requires a mind which does not exist in clumps of cells. Your hypothesis has no basis.

You keep repeating the same mantra about “advanced planning”, and I keep repeating that I do not accept it. That is why I go on about the organismal changes which seem so obviously to RESULT from environmental change: pre-whales enter the water, fish come onto dry land, pre-humans descend from the trees to the plains, and all of their bodies undergo major changes enabling them to live in their new environment. I suggest that these major changes follow the same sequence as adaptations, in that they are RESPONSES to the environment and not divine preparations for it. Responses to new situations do not entail advance planning, but I agree that they require intelligence, which is why - unlike you - I am so unwilling to dismiss the findings of those experts in the field who inform us that cells are sentient, cognitive, decision-making beings.

dhw:. 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.
DAVID: We've agreed on this except, with the one difference that He provides the guidelines for the planning. Imagination of the future requires a mind who provides guidelines.

Same again. Now you agree that God can produce saltations without advanced planning, but saltations require advanced planning! In my hypothesis there is no imagining of the future. There is response to a new present. If you think God can’t do it, then fair enough. If you think he can, then why do you think he can’t create a mechanism that will do the same, without his interference?

DAVID: ...it is interesting you won't allow me blind faith in my theory. I am the one with faith!
dhw: 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?
DAVID: I'm not going to change my conclusions. You have a perfect right to object to them, even though you cannot accept that God exists and has managed evolution to produce humans.

I accept the possibility that God exists, but I cannot see – any more than you can – why he should design eight different stages of whale (plus a few million other anomalies) solely in order to keep life going until he can fulfil what you think is his one and only purpose of producing homo sapiens. The fact that you have blind faith in your hypothesis is no more of a justification for it than Dawkins announcing his blind faith that random mutations and natural selection explain the whole of life.