An Alternative to Evolution: Expounded Upon (Introduction)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Sunday, July 15, 2018, 14:18 (2321 days ago) @ dhw

DHW You keep hammering home the case against chance and for design, and all theistic evolutionists agree with you! Why do you keep ignoring them? An alternative to evolution governed by chance is evolution governed by design.

I'm not ignoring them. As of right now, we can not observe the Designer, he/she/it/or otherwise. So I don't, in the hypothesis, speculate or who or what the designer is.
I have acknowdged that other versions of design are possible, and have simply asked for the experimental evidence that the method is possible.

dhw I have long since accepted the science without the religion. I am an agnostic largely because I recognize the scientific case for design but cannot accept the religion.

Realizing that there is a designer does not require any particular assumptions about the designer.

Dhw You keep talking of faulty cladistics. I would accept this definition of species: a group of organisms capable of interbreeding. And like everyone else, I don’t know how speciation took place... Our quest is to find out why species are definitively different now. So let’s look at your own theory:

In response to David, you wrote that the alternative to common descent was that “he designed prototypes, with built in variability parameters, and that life has stayed within those types and those variability parameters.” ... Why is the unobservable process of speciation by divine prototype manufacture more scientific than the unobservable process of divine programming of speciation, or divine provision of autonomous intelligences to conduct their own evolution? All of them fit the design theory.

But not all fit the evidence. Speciation has never been observed, and the are multiple failsafe which should actively prevent it from occurring. There is also the information gap, which could be explained by dabbling, if you were willing to accept that he dabbled with literally every individual species.

DHW: I might predict that science will discover natural means of innovation (e.g. cellular intelligence).
TONY: How can this be tested? As long as there is no evidence, you can just keep saying "We haven't found it yet" and there would be no way to disprove the negative.

How can you test that thousands of millions of years ago, a bunch of prototypes appeared out of nowhere?

The same way they have failed to prove evolution.... Check the fossil record. Is it a steady linear progression or punctuated equilibrium?

DHW... you are not willing to contemplate the possibility that an organism can ACQUIRE new information and then pass it on.
Tony: I didn't say I was unwilling to contemplate it, I said the evidence is actually AGAINST it. There are too many processes whose sole function is to prevent and repair changes to the genome.

DHW We are not talking about known processes. Nobody knows what process led to the different species! There is no known process whereby prototypes suddenly sprang into existence. (Back we go to design, a designer, and different design theories.)

Evolution is a process, as is design. One way or the other, you have to believe the fantastic.... And at the end, it will be a matter of faith.

TONY: I've noticed that there has been some difficulty in even thinking about biology without evolution. [...] the language is so fluid and murky as to be meaningless. Are you including Abiogeneis (which violates the Law of Biogenesis) as part of what you mean when you say 'Evolution'? Do you mean common descent and random mutations acted upon by Natural selection? Do you simply mean 'to change'?

DHW Of course evolution does not include abiogenesis. Darwin specified that his Origin of Species did NOT cover origin of life (although in later editions he attributed it to a Creator).

Then why must I?

Dhw I keep repeating that I do mean common descent but NOT random mutations. It is you who insist that evolution means random mutations, but I myself reject randomness, as do theistic evolutionists such as our David.

Actually, it is the text books that insist on random chance. The mainstream theory of evolution depends o random mutations. I can't comment on the requirements of these unspecified other hypotheses. If you reject chance, congratulatiins, you are a theist, not agnostic. There is either random chance or design. Naturalism or Theism. Welcome to theistic design.

TONY: Every definition of species fails to match all the data, yet you think speciation is real, without evidence. Any time I press for hard definitions there is a lot of harumphing and paper shuffling.

I have no idea what you are referring to. You have given us as good a definition of species as we can get (see above). The theory of evolution proposes that what you call the "prototypes" sprang from earlier forms of life, going all the way back to the first living cells. No harrumphing.

TONY: You *think* in terms of Macroevolution, huge leaps of fully complete genetic information, even with all the missing evidence.

You think of huge leaps of fully complete genetic information in the form of prototypes, which could only have been designed, and theistic evolutionists think of common descent via a process which could only have been designed. Your alternative to evolution is not design – it is separate creation.

--
What is the purpose of living? How about, 'to reduce needless suffering. It seems to me to be a worthy purpose.