Convoluted human evolution: a branch is missing (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, August 13, 2017, 11:12 (2660 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: If I decide God is fully in control, and you don't want Him to be, then my faith makes no sense to you.

dhw: I have no problem with the concept of a God in full control. My problem is with your interpretation of your God’s intentions, when I look at the reality of evolutionary history. I simply don’t understand why a God in full control, who has the single purpose of producing the human brain, should devote so much attention to preprogramming or personally dabbling eight stages of whale, the monarch’s migratory lifestyle, the weaverbird’s nest, and a zillion other innovations, lifestyles and natural wonders. So I offer a different theistic hypothesis, in which your God chooses to allow his invention of life and evolution to run its own course. Even you have agreed that this hypothesis fits in perfectly with the history of evolution as we know it.

DAVID: Yes it fits evolution as we see the history. Your views simply leaves out the possibility of a purpose driving evolution. The crowning achievement of the process is the human brain, the most complex functional biological organ in the universe. Nothing else organic or inorganic is equal to it. Just add purpose to your purposeless thinking.

It does not leave out the possibility of a purpose – it merely challenges your own particular concept of a purpose, which does NOT fit the history of evolution (see above). I have offered you a purpose that fits in perfectly with the history, and even incorporates the possibility of your God setting the process in motion: namely, evolution is driven by the twin purposes of survival and improvement. Humans embody both “drives”, and are themselves motivated by them.

DAVID: All of science provides a background to see the purpose in evolution. Designs found in nature, elucidated by science, provide the background to understand a planning mind is required.

I cannot see “all of science” confirming your belief that the purpose of every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder was to produce the human brain. I agree, however, that the designs found in nature require intelligence. That does not mean the intelligence can only be that of a single, sourceless, unknown and unknowable mind creating robots incapable of designing anything for themselves (apart from humans, who for some reason have been granted autonomy, but we mustn’t ask why in case we anthropomorphize God).