An Alternative to Evolution: Expounded Upon (Introduction)

by dhw, Saturday, July 28, 2018, 12:14 (2108 days ago) @ Balance_Maintained

TONY: What if God created a small number of seed species, with enough information in them to allow for limited future development, and allowed them to do their thing on earth for a time before planting new seed species. The reason for the limitation is not a limitation on God, but of the environment itself. If he had allowed the genetic information to be released to early, there would most likely be a catastrophic outcome as changes in organisms become incompatible with the environment. So, these limitations on a seed species are the boundaries of its evolutionary potential. New seed species are direct creations. All the variants of them would essentially follow what we actually see in the genetic record.

dhw: This is circular reasoning. If God imposed limitations on plants (and animals), they would not be able to go beyond those limitations, and therefore he would create new plants and animals. You might just as well ask: What if he created a small number of life forms with enough information in them to allow for unlimited future development, including adaptation to and exploitation of new environments? Then they could evolve instead of him needing to create new species directly.

DAVID: Not circular. All you are proposing is a robotic form of producing something new. Robots can replace humans for specific functions, but not multiple new functions beyond the original. That requires not only foresight and planning, but the original program would have to be a placement of the information in God's mind in the genome of each organism.

This is precisely the objection I have to your theory that your God provided the first cells with programmes for every undabbled innovation, lifestyle and natural wonder in the history of life, to be passed down for millions and millions of years, through all the different environments and by all the different cell communities. Every preprogrammed organism according to you is a robot. It simply beggars my belief. On the other hand, what I propose is information in the form of cellular intelligence – precisely the opposite of robotic. We humans invent machines that far exceed our own natural limits. If your God can create a mechanism that enables us to do that, why shouldn’t he have created a mechanism that enables other organisms to do their own inventing, as opposed to them all being robots?

TONY: That is not circular reasoning. When we design things, we design them for a purpose, knowing full well there are limitations.

Why do you compare your God to a human designer? Of course the reasoning is circular. If you design something with limits, you end up with something that has limits.

TONY: …we design I order, understanding that the infrastructure must be I place to support our innovations. Some innovations must wait for the right time, or they will simply fail and Peter out. Why is that such an unrealistic concept to be applied to the greatest design ever designed?

Not unrealistic at all. If your God provided his invention with the means to adapt to different environments, why could he not provide them with the means to exploit different environments by coming up with new inventions? The greatest design ever designed may include the means not only to reproduce, to adapt, to vary, but also to innovate. If humans can innovate, what makes you so sure that other organisms can’t? But I accept the argument that no one has ever observed evolutionary innovation. It’s a hypothesis. No one has ever observed new organisms appearing from nowhere, let alone a God who preprogrammes, dabbles or separately creates them.