Evolution, survival and adaptation (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, September 17, 2017, 15:34 (2622 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I recognize those are your questions which keep you agnostic. Accepting God's existence does away with your issues. How logical is God in human terms? Perhaps not at all.

dhw: They are not the questions that keep me agnostic. They are the questions I ask when I put on my theist hat, and you cannot answer them because they pinpoint the anomalies in your anthropocentric theory of evolution and your personal concept of your God.

Your theistic hat contains a human attempt to be logical about God, rather than accepting the evidence that God's works offer. He can only be understood from what we see He created and how it seems He did it.

DAVID: You can't build a house without a plan. Crystal-ball gazing is required. "Their own path to speciation" response must be a step by step attempt, which cannot produce highly complex physiology or phenotypic change all at once, as the fossil gaps show. You cannot avoid the need for design.

dhw: We are not talking about house-building but about how organisms change. Nobody understands the latter. But we actually see it happening in cases of minor adaptation, and this is in RESPONSE to environmental change. If it is not rapid, organisms will die. We have no idea how swiftly organisms can make major changes to themselves. You simply assume they can’t do it. You may be right, and you may be wrong – it is a hypothesis. I don’t know why you think I am avoiding the need for design. I am only questioning the need for your God to do all the designing. (And to please you, I can even allow for the odd dabble, which might include sapiens’ brain, though as I pointed out earlier, I can see that as a perfectly logical progression from earlier brains.) For instance, I see no reason why – in his quest to produce the human brain – he should have taken the trouble to design eight stages of whale, to guide the monarch butterfly to its distant destination (having also fiddled with its reproductive cycle), and to give the weaverbird private lessons in nest-building.

You are not avoiding design, but trying to find ways around the principals of how design occurs. You know how it occurs in human terms on Earth today. Since you don't like the concept of God, the hidden eternal engineer of reality, you want a mechanism to appear, by itself, which must be by chance, after life appears (somehow, but lets avoid that miracle), that speciates with huge gaps in the fossil record. The fossil record leaps and jumps. Why don't you restart your thinking from that point of view? I find the basic footprints of your theories planted firmly in mid air.