Evolution, survival and adaptation (Evolution)

by David Turell , Monday, September 18, 2017, 17:49 (2621 days ago) @ dhw

dhw: With my theist hat on, I suggest he wanted to create an ever changing show which perhaps he continues to watch. You suggest he wanted to create Homo sapiens, you don’t know why he had to create a higgledy-piggledy bush of whales and monarchs and weaverbirds’ nests and hominins in order to get there, and he’s hidden himself because…well, why has he hidden himself, and is he watching or not?

We know he's there because only a designing mind could have created life. We don't know if He is watching, but since He is in charge, I'm sure he is. Why create and n ot watch the outcomes?

DAVID: 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.

dhw: Hey, hold on! Design occurs through intelligence, and I am proposing that all organisms are intelligent in their own particular way. Who says I don’t like the concept of God? I am an agnostic, not an atheist. I do not “want a mechanism that appears by itself by chance”! Its origin is a mystery, which is why I always specify that the mechanism may have been invented by your God. This is the unworthy digression you always indulge in when I challenge your version of how evolution works and of what your God’s purpose might be. That is why I put on my theist’s hat, so that we can begin with the same basic premise.

We don't start with the same basic premise. Your theist hat is skewed, and you don't realize it. For example I don't know why God made the whales but I can sure He did because of the obvious design planning that must be done to span each gap between the eight stages. You want organisms to be their own architects to jump to the next species. Your theory fits only minor adaptations in existing species.

DAVID: 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.

dhw: If your God was capable of preprogramming every leap and jump 3.8 billion years ago, I’m sure he was also capable of producing a mechanism that would do its own leaping and jumping. Once more: I am not excluding your God. I am challenging your hypothesis that your God designed every twig on the higgledy-piggledy bush, and that he did so in order to fulfil his primary purpose of producing the human brain.

Either way, under your theory, God is in charge. don't you realize that?