Evolution: frog adaptation (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, September 21, 2017, 15:12 (2618 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: You skip over the point as usual. Please look at the whales. We both know exactly what conditions have to be planned for to have an air breathing mammal enter water as a full time environment. You constantly overlook the issue of purpose. Darwinism doesn't know where it is going. Evolution is either chance or knows where it is going. Whether you realize it or not, you start your thinking from a chance approach.

dhw: You start with the assumption that the whale entered the water fully equipped for aquatic life (although incomprehensibly for you, it took your God eight stages and millions of years to perfect the equipment). From my perspective, this is the wrong starting point. Pre-whale would have entered the water to explore. From then on, each stage would have been an improvement, as it adapted to life in the water, which was its purpose. You yourself keep admitting that you don’t know the purpose of the eight-stage whale, let alone how it links up with what you keep saying is God’s primary purpose, the production of the brain of Homo sapiens. As for my thinking, it starts with the unknown factor of how life originated, and I cannot believe in chance or in God, which is why I remain agnostic. From the moment living forms appear, I regard them as pursuing the purposes of survival and/or improvement, and the only chance element is environmental change. If God exists, I suspect that his purpose was to produce a show for himself (but this need not mean detachment – he could have feelings just like ours). If he does not exist, the universe has no purpose, but organisms have their own purposes, as above. I don’t think I can express it any more clearly.

Again skipping over the clear problem. Your pre-whale wishes to live in water. He has purpose. Now he needs to design some changes so he can achieve his goal. He has to understand what is required in order to modify. He needs to see needs in his future role. You gloss over this entire problem of how " [they] pursu[e] the purposes of survival and/or improvement". Something must be acting with foresight to cover the large gaps in form and physiology that the fossil record shows. Your cover your nebulous concept with the word "pursue" or "pursuing". We know that only a mind can plan. This is the basis of the ID philosophy. You could accept that and not include God.