autonomy v. automaticity (Evolution)

by David Turell , Thursday, February 15, 2018, 14:44 (2471 days ago) @ dhw

DAVID: I can easily accept that in your 'theistic mode' you and I are in general agreement.

dhw: Well, yes, in relation to many religious beliefs, I think we are. But your illogical insistence that your God personally designed every natural wonder etc. in the history of life, and did so for the sole purpose of producing the brain of Homo sapiens...no, I don't think I shall ever accept that this must be true because God's logic is different from ours.

DAVID: My reasoning is not God's logic difference. My logic: The human brain is a total surprise based on your contention that improvement and survival drive evolution. I don't believe they do based on bacterial survival without brains. I firmly believe in a drive to complexity, which is a clear and obvious choice, supplied by God. We've been over all this.

dhw: I don’t know why you always pick on survival and leave out improvement! So don’t you regard the human brain as an improvement over, say, the chimp brain? And you have missed out the first part of the problem, which is the sheer illogicality of your God taking all the trouble to personally design the weaverbird’s nest and millions of other natural wonders extant and extinct over 3.x thousand million years, when all he wants to do is produce sapiens’ brain. (That's when you defend your hypothesis by claiming God's logic is different from ours.) And you have already agreed that complexity for its own sake without a purpose makes no sense.

There is obvious improvement within any drive for complexity. Complexity explains the arrival of the unexpected (human brains) and unreasonable (whales), which you ignore. Complexity has purpose, the human brain, and no sense, the whales. You are cheerry picking my comments.