An Alternative to Evolution: Expounded Upon (Introduction)

by dhw, Monday, July 23, 2018, 09:31 (2314 days ago) @ David Turell

DAVID: Think! No fence. If God guided every step in evolving humans, evolution occurred with common descent.

dhw: A few days ago I asked if you believed your God dabbled with existing life forms or created them from scratch. ...This seems to be confirmed by your statement above that you do not reject the separate creation theory – the exact opposite of common descent – and even think your God might have “stepped into the process continuously”. Or maybe only “at various points”. So you believe in common descent but you don’t reject the separate creation theory, which may have been continuous, and you are not sitting on the fence.

DAVID: As explained before I view the term common descent in a specific way, which is obviously not your definition. Life started as single cells and in stages of increasing complexity reached humans with subsequent stages based on previous ones. God guided it continuously or intermittently. Your common descent differs how? Because you think it is all natural? My 'evolution' looks just like yours.

Of course it looks like mine! We both believe that life started with single cells and became increasingly complex, developing not just into humans but into every single species that ever existed! But you refuse to recognize that separate creation is the direct opposite of common descent, and you claim that the Cambrian was separate creation, and your use of terms like “dabble”, “guide”, “step in” therefore also suggests separate creation which you now say may have been continuous. In fact your concept of God’s “guidance” (which may = separate creation) applies not only to speciation but also to every lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life. God “steps in” to design them all. The discussion is not about how evolution “looks”, but how it happened, and your view is that your God may have done it all by separate creation, or some of it by separate creation, although you believe in common descent, but you are not fence sitting.

dhw: [..] we know for a fact that some organisms are able to make changes to themselves in order to cope with changes in the environment. They do not anticipate – they react. I do not believe for one second that pre-whales looked into the future and prepared themselves for life in the water. I believe that all the changes would have taken place after they entered the water, and all the different stages represented improvements as they accustomed themselves to life in the water.

DAVID: Here you are equating enormous species change in whale stages as simple adaptations! You are as usual reverting to Darwin.

You are discussing this with me, not with Darwin. I never said the changes were simple, and as always I qualified my argument by acknowledging that it is a hypothesis, as there is no proof that the cell communities are capable of major innovations.

DAVID: We all know there is no proof. Some of us want a reasonable explanation, not fence sitting.

I consider adaptations as evidence of cellular intelligence, and so the hypothesis that the cell communities are also capable of major innovations seems to me at least as reasonable as the hypothesis that these came about through random mutations, or that an unknown designer fiddled with the anatomy of pre-whales before they entered the water, and then kept fiddling and fiddling, because he needed all these changes to provide food so that life could continue until he was able to produce the brain of Homo sapiens.