autonomy v. automaticity (Evolution)

by dhw, Thursday, February 01, 2018, 13:53 (2485 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: The answer to the first comment is God is in control by whatever means He needs to be for evolution to continue. The weaver bird is part of balance of nature which provides the energy for life to continue evolving through time. It took time to get to the human brain, which you acknowledge.

dhw: If you have no idea what form “semiautonomy” or “guidelines” might take, and the only possibilities you can see are divine dabbling or a 3.8-billion-year-old programme for every innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder (both meaning no autonomy at all), then there is no point in your introducing such terms. How the knots in a nest can provide energy to keep life going so that your God can produce the human brain I really don’t know. Evolution of everything takes time. That doesn’t mean that God taught the weaverbird to tie knots so that he could have enough time to produce the human brain.

DAVID: The nest is a clever construction to protect young weavers.

All nests are clever constructions to protect all nest-building birds, and some are cleverer than others. So do you think your God preprogrammed/dabbled every nest, or did he just pick on the weaverbird and leave other birds to use their autonomous intelligence to work out how to interweave the component parts and attach them to the branches?

DAVID: By surviving, that is how they provide energy in a balance of nature, even though you cannot see the connection to ongoing evolution.

All organisms provide energy. The balance of nature is constantly changing and means nothing more than the fact that whatever species exist at the time exist at the time. Evolution is an ongoing process, but that fact provides no link whatsoever to your hypothesis that your God designed every single life form, lifestyle and natural wonder, and did so for the sole purpose of producing the human brain.