An Alternative to Evolution: Expounded Upon (Introduction)

by David Turell , Saturday, July 28, 2018, 14:48 (2308 days ago) @ dhw

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.

dhw: 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?

Such an inventive mechanism runs by independent organisms has no way to analyze the future needs that an active mind would supply. You are still at the robot stage. We human invent machines better than us because we can envision them. God's program at the beginning of life includes the future vision.