Evolution, survival and adaptation (Evolution)

by David Turell , Tuesday, October 03, 2017, 14:22 (2387 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: Don't you realize your paragraph is supposition piled on supposition to explain in your mind what is miraculous material. Why is there any life? Why did the human brain appear? If you look at it from a sense of wonder and appreciation purpose can appear. If you then say to yourself it all requires planning, that planning must come from a miraculous mind. It is all very logical to me. I see the coherence you can't find.

dhw: You keep talking of purpose, but you admit that you can’t answer my questions about how your own speculations concerning purpose fit in with the history of life, and you refuse to consider a hypothesis (not a supposition but a suggestion) which answers those questions. The sense of wonder and appreciation applies every bit as much to my hypothesis as it does to yours, so here are the suggestions in their theistic form. Why is there life? Because God wanted to create life. Why did God want to create life? Because he wanted to create a spectacle that he could watch. How did he do it? He created an autonomous mechanism which enabled living cells to change themselves into all kinds of wonderful creatures, including humans. How much of this was planned? The design of the autonomous intelligent cell was entirely his, and his plan was to create a system of changing environments which provided both challenges and opportunities for his autonomous cell communities to adapt to or exploit, so that there would be an ever changing variety of life. But he also left himself the option to dabble if he felt like it. For some people, the human brain is so unique that it must have been the result of a dabble. Some people may think that Chixculub was another dabble. But the variety of organisms, lifestyles and natural wonders extant and extinct is the result of autonomous intelligences, exploiting or not exploiting, coping or not coping with environmental changes. We do not have to ask unanswerable questions such as why God planned the whale and the weaverbird’s nest (he didn’t), why he adopted such a roundabout way of producing the brain of Homo sapiens (he didn’t, though he may have dabbled), whether he did or did not control every single environmental change, whether his powers are limited, why he remains hidden if he wants contact with humans etc., because they are all covered by a simple proposal: what we see is what he wanted – namely an ever changing spectacle. That provides both purpose and, in our case and perhaps also in his, a sense of wonder and appreciation. So once again, please tell us which of your “unanswerable questions” this hypothesis fails to answer.

You have created an inventive scenario that fits the facts, no question. But it defines a different motive for God than those who believe in Him would ever want to accept. Since it fits, it is a possible interpretation, but that is not proof. My proof to myself gets into the issue of design complexity, which I constantly present here and you admit its importance and then appear to gloss it over in your theories. The complexity requires design by a planning mind is my constant point. I'll stick with it.